“There is no action of man in this life,” says Thomas of Malmesbury, “which is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences, as that no human providence is high enough to give us a prospect to the end.” The chain of causes however is as long as the chain of consequences,—peradventure longer; and when I think of the causes which have combined to procreate this book, and the consequences which of necessity it must produce, I am lost in admiration. How many accidents might for ever have impossibilitated the existence of this incomparable work! If, for instance, I the Unknown, had been born in any other part of the world than in the British dominions; or in any other age than one so near the time in which the venerable subject of these memoirs flourished; or in any other place than where these localities could have been learnt, and all these personalities were remembered; or if I had not counted it among my felicities like the philosopher of old, and the Polish Jews of this day, (who thank God for it in their ritual), to have been born a male instead of a female; or if I had been born too poor to obtain the blessings of education, or too rich to profit by them: or if I had not been born at all. If indeed in the course of six thousand years which have elapsed since the present race of intellectual inhabitants were placed upon this terraqueous globe, any chance had broken off one marriage among my innumerable married progenitors, or thwarted the courtship of those my equally innumerable ancestors who lived before that ceremony was instituted, or in countries where it was not known,—where, or how would my immortal part have existed at this time, or in what shape would these bodily elements have been compounded with which it is invested? A single miscarriage among my millions of grandmothers might have cut off the entail of my mortal being! _Quid non evertit primordia frivola vitæ? Nec mirum, vita est integra pene nihil. Nunc perit, ah! tenui pereuntis odore lucernæ, Et fumum hunc fumus fortior ille fugat. Totum aquilis Cæsar rapidis circumvolet orbem, Collegamque sibi vix ferat esse Jovem. Quantula res quantos potuisset inepta triumphos, Et magnum nasci vel prohibere Deum! Exhæredasset moriente lucernula flammâ Tot dominis mundum numinibusque novis. Tu quoque tantilli, juvenis Pellæe, perisses, (Quam gratus terris ille fuisset odor!) Tu tantùm unius qui pauper regulus orbis, Et prope privatus visus es esse tibi. Nec tu tantùm, idem potuisset tollere casus Teque Jovis fili, Bucephalumque tuum: Dormitorque urbem malè delevisset agaso Bucephalam è vestris, Indica Fata, libris._[1]