And this is how, allowing my pen to run away with me, I have devoted more pages to a man of uncertain future than I have given to persons whose memory is assured. It is a misfortune to live too long; I have come to a period of sterility in which France sees only lean generations run: _Lupa carca nella sua magrezza._[296] These Memoirs diminish in interest with the days that have supervened, diminish by what they were able to borrow from the greatness of events: they will end, I fear me, like the daughters of Achelous[297]. The Roman Empire, so magnificently proclaimed by Livy, contracts and goes out dimly in the accounts of Cassiodorus. You were more fortunate, O Thucydides and Plutarch, Sallust and Tacitus, when you told of the parties that divided Athens and Rome! You were certain, at least, of animating them, not only with your genius, but also with the splendour of the Greek and the gravity of the Latin language! What could we relate of our expiring society, we Welshmen, in our jargon confined to narrow and barbarous limits? If these later pages reproduced our parliamentary tautology, those eternal definitions of our rights, our ministerial prize-fights, would they, fifty years hence, be anything more than the unintelligible columns of an old newspaper? Of a thousand and one conjectures, would a single one prove to be true? Who would foresee the strange leaps and bounds of the inconstancy of the French spirit? Who could understand how its execrations and infatuations, its curses and blessings become transformed without apparent reason? Who would be able to guess and explain how, by turns, it adores and detests, how it springs from a political system, how, with liberty on its lips and bondage in its heart, it believes in one truth in the morning and is persuaded of a contrary truth at night? Throw us a few grains of dust: like Virgil's bees, we shall cease our conflict to fly away elsewhither[298]. If, by chance, anything great should still be stirring here below, our country will remain supine. The womb of a society that is becoming discomposed is barren; the very crimes which it begets are still-born crimes, smitten as they are with the barrenness of their origin. The period upon which we are entering is the tow-path along which fatally condemned generations will draw the old world towards a world unknown.