“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.” And when the citizens of Angiers haughtily closed their gates against both King Philip and King John, the taunt is raised (_King John_, act ii. sc. 1, l. 373, vol. iv. p. 26),— “By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings, And stand securely on their battlements, As in a theatre, whence they gape and point At your industrious scenes and acts of death.” _Plate 15_ [Illustration: _Seven Ages of Life from an early Block Print in the British Museum_] The stages or ages of man have been variously divided. In the Arundel MS., and in a Dutch work printed at Antwerp in 1820, there are ten of these divisions of Man’s Life.[170] The celebrated physician Hippocrates (B.C. 460–357), and Proclus, the Platonist (A.D. 412–485), are said to have divided human life, as Shakespeare has done, into _seven_ ages. And a mosaic on the pavement of the cathedral at Siena gives exactly the same division. This mosaic is very curious, and is supposed to have been executed by Antonio Federighi in the year 1476. Martin’s “SHAKSPERE’S SEVEN AGES,” published in 1848, contains a little narrative about it, furnished by Lady Calcott, who shortly before that time had been travelling in Italy,— “We found,” she says, “in the cathedral of Sienna a curious proof that the division of human life into seven periods, from infancy to extreme old age with a view to draw a moral inference, was common before Shakspeare’s time: the person who was showing us that fine church directed our attention to the large and bold designs of Beccafumi, which are inlaid in black and white in the pavement, entirely neglecting some works of a much older date which appeared to us to be still more interesting on account of the simplicity and elegance with which they are designed. Several of these represent Sibyls and other figures of a mixed moral and religious character; but in one of the side chapels we were both suprised and pleased to find seven figures, each in a separate compartment, inlaid in the pavement, representing the Seven Ages of Man.” Lord Lindsay notices the same work, and in his “CHRISTIAN ART,” vol. iii. p. 112, speaking of the Pavement of the Duomo at Siena, says,—“Seven ages of life in the Southern Nave, near the Capella del Voto.” Of as old a date, even if not more ancient, is the Representation of the Seven Ages from a Block-Print belonging to the British Museum, and of which we present a diminished facsimile (Plate XV.), the original measuring 15½ in. by 10½ in.