Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/32

 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY

is no harder fate than to be immortalized as a fool; to have one's name—which merits nothing sterner than obliteration—handed down to generations as an example of silliness, or stupidity, or presumption; to be enshrined pitilessly in the amber of the "Dunciad"; to be laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb's impatient and inextinguishable raillery. When an industrious young authoress named Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger—a model of painstaking insignificance—invited Charles and Mary Lamb to drink tea with her one cold December night, she little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and unenviable fame; and that, when her half dozen books should have lapsed into comfortable oblivion, she herself should never be fortunate enough to be forgotten. It is a cruel chance which crystallizes the folly of an hour, and makes it outlive our most serious endeavours. Perhaps we should do well to consider this painful