Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/198

184 his tent and discuss questions of philosophy and theology. Sir Charles Warren has told us how, when Rhodes was quite a young man, he and Warren had a long debate over the Thirty-nine Articles, and differed hopelessly upon the doctrine of predestination. His favourite author was said to have been Gibbon, but what served him as a pocket-Bible was the writings of Marcus Aurelius. As Gordon never went anywhere without his little pocket edition of Thomas à Kempis, so Rhodes never left behind him his pocket edition of Marcus Aurelius. His copy was dog-eared and scored with pencil marks, showing how constantly he had used it. But he never quite attained to the serene philosophy of the Imperial philosopher. He shrank from death, not so much from the fear of anything after death, but because it was the arrest of activity, the cessation of the strenuous life which he had always lived. He was ever a doer. Once an acquaintance had remarked to him, when he returned from London to South Africa—

“I suppose you found London Society very lively?”

To whom Mr. Rhodes replied—

“When I have a big thing on hand I don’t dine out. I do that, and nothing else.”

It was this feeling which led him to cling so passionately to life. From the day when his heart suddenly gave way, and he fell from his horse and shattered his shoulder, he felt that he lived under the sword of Damocles, and at any moment the hair which suspended it might break and all would be over. It was this overmastering passion of energetic vitality which prompted his despairing cry when he lay on his death-bed—“So much to do, so little done!”