I'd rather in your favour live,
Than in a lasting name;
And much a greater rate would give
For happiness than fame.
THEODOSIUS. 1700."
When I look at these faint records of gallantry and tenderness; when I
contemplate the fading portraits of these beautiful girls, and think,
too, that they have long since bloomed, reigned, grown old, died, and
passed away, and with them all their graces, their triumphs, their
rivalries, their admirers; the whole empire of love and pleasure in
which they ruled--"all dead, all buried, all forgotten," I find a
cloud of melancholy stealing over the present gayeties around me. I
was gazing, in a musing mood, this very morning, at the portrait of
the lady whose husband was killed abroad, when the fair Julia entered
the gallery, leaning on the arm of the captain. The sun shone through
the row of windows on her as she passed along, and she seemed to beam
out each time into brightness, and relapse into shade, until the door
at the bottom of the gallery closed after her. I felt a sadness of
heart at the idea, that this was an emblem of her lot: a few more
years of sunshine and shade, and all this life and loveliness, and
enjoyment, will have ceased, and nothing be left to commemorate this
beautiful being but one more perishable portrait; to awaken, perhaps,
the trite speculations of some future loiterer, like myself, when I
and my scribblings shall have lived through our brief existence, and
been forgotten.
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