Josephus says, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” and it might well be applied to the concerns of this day, for what one of us has not at some time or other felt a “pactum illicitum,” a “qualis ab incepto,” as it were, permeating his whole being, and bringing vividly before the retina the transitory state of all things worldly? As Chaucer said: For who so wolde senge the cattes skin, Than wol the cat wel dwellen in here in. For it cannot be gainsaid that, despite the tendency toward materialism, the cosmic rush and the spiritual captivity that lead so many brave souls into the martyrdom of Achiacharus, there is in all of us a certain quality that must and will assert itself. It seems but yesterday that Shelley, in his poem on “Mutability,” said: We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; but how pat is the application to-day! We _are_ as clouds. You who boast yourself of your ancestry, you whose dignity is as a cloak of ermine, ye are but clouds. How well Goethe knew this! We all remember those lambent lines of his--I cannot translate adequately, so I will quote from the original German: Fräulein Anna, das Papier in Deutschland ist wie das Papier in Amerika. Ages ago Sophocles had worded it in almost the same phrase: Oh, race of mortal men oppressed with care! What nothings are we, like to shadows vain, Cumb’ring the ground and wandering to and fro. The greatest poets, from Le Gallienne down to Shakspere, have been aware of this evanescent property in the cumbrous and exsufflicate prowlers amid these “glimpses of the moon.” Well may we say with Cæsar, “Quamdiu se bene gesserit.” [Illustration] There is always a touch of ozone in the words of Horace, and we find him saying of this very thing, “Precieuse ridicules pretiosa supellex.” Could it have been said better? How airily he pricks the bubble of man’s self-esteem! “Dressed in a little brief authority,” man plays his part amid mundane happenings tremelloid and sejant, and with a sort of innate connascence, a primitive conglutinate efflorescence, he approaches nearer and nearer, day by day, to that time when, as Shakspere hath it, “the beachy girdle of the ocean” will resolve itself into its component parts, and man as man will cease to exist. But, to pass to a more inchoate view of these things,--to the “opum furiata cupido” of the ancient Latins,--what is there in all this that tends to lessen a man’s self-glorification, his auto-apotheosis? Victor Hugo can tell us: Petit bourgeois père La Chaise Pour prendre congé tour de force Connaisseur tout Thérèse Façon de parler Edmund Gosse. The author of “Les Misérables” was himself a man, and he knew. And no less a man was Coplas de Manrique, and in his beautiful lyric, “Caballeros,” he says: Tiene Vd.-Usted mi sombrero Tiene Vd.-Usted mi chaleco No lo tengo, no lo tengo Tiene Vd.-Usted mi.