Charles James Fox, who was, from infancy, a spoiled child, would spend night after night in gambling, and wasting his sweet nature in the orgies of Bacchus. Then he would flee away to the delightful scenery and refreshing air of St. Anne’s Hill, and there betake himself to gardening, in a blue apron; or to the learned leisure of his study, in the bosom of conjugal felicity and friendship. --------------------- Footnote 131: _The Original._ By Thomas Walker, M.A. ---------------------------- THE LIFE OF MAN. It is impossible to say what analogy exists between the race and the individual, and attempts to explain the history of the one by the stages which mark the life of the other are at best more ingenious than satisfactory; but almost every fact with which we are acquainted seems to suggest that some such analogy exists, though its particulars are altogether unknown, and though we cannot even say whether mankind ought to be compared to one individual or to several. It may, however, be allowable, in dealing with a subject which, after all, appeals rather to the feelings and to the imagination than to the reason, to point out the fact that the cessation of human society would present a striking analogy to the death of individuals; and that there would be the same contradictory mixture of completeness and incompleteness about a society eternally renewed, as there would be about a human being who never died. That the life of a man forms a moral whole, is a conviction which is so thoroughly worked into our minds and our very language, that no one doubts it. That it is a mysterious and utterly contradictory thing at its best estate, is the experience of every person who has even ordinary powers of reflection. It is hard to imagine the degree in which these mysteries and contradictions would be heightened if man were immortal. If, after arriving at that average degree of prudence and self-restraint which almost every one attains comparatively early in life, people lived on and on for centuries and millenniums, carrying on the same sort of transactions, settling the same difficulties, enjoying the same pleasures, and suffering from the same vexations, the question why they ever were sent into the world at all (which is even now sufficiently perplexing) would become altogether overwhelming; and the faith which people at present maintain in the Divine government of the world would have to be based on entirely different grounds, if it survived at all. It is perhaps not merely fanciful to suggest that a somewhat similar difficulty would exist if human society, after a long and laborious education, were to attain to a stationary state, and were then to go on indefinitely enjoying itself. Such a heaven on earth would be at best a sort of high life below stairs.