[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578. The king, Dom Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field. As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal which had not its dead to mourn. [12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian, along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger Cagliari. Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605. It consists of two works--the _Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up for the secret use of the Council of Ten. Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems to have lived with a pen in his hand. His manuscripts in the Venice archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes. The first collected edition of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the Bastille. LECTURE VII THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN [_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900] Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous, unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history to the present hour. They are ancient as the rocks and their musings from eternity, inextinguishable as the _élan_ of the soul imprisoned in time towards that which is beyond time. And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real Illusion--more poignant. Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1] when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford. Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers. Nothing so instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under "meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires, states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the ordinances of the world. Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht. Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]