Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/31

 "RECOLLECTIONS OF A LITERARY LIFE."

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"Eheu fugaces anni! How have the years fled since my life commenced, and my literary career began! At first sight it seems almost absurd for any man to sit down to the serious and laborious task of his own biography. As years increase, our years, our months, our weeks seem to become shorter. We seem to be as 'of yesterday, and to know nothing.' Yet I never met with a man who, in spite of all his infirmities, his failures, his sins, would like to live his life over again: the probability being very strong that it would be merely a repetition of infirmity, of failure, and of sin. This is a wise arrangement of Heaven, for if the contrary feeling were indulged, and a redivivus were granted to men, ere long would the world become choke-full of Methuselahs, and forthcoming generations would have to migrate to the uninhabited planets, if, indeed, any such really exist.

"Still, the practice of writing men's lives, either autobiographically or by the pens of others, has prevailed from the very dawn of literature. The oldest written book extant informs us that 'there was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job,' and furnishes us with his history, and the opinions of himself and his contemporaries. Throughout the whole course of the Hebrew, the Classical, and the Middle Ages, down to our own days, a passion has existed for narrating the lives of men; and though the autobiographies are few in comparison with the 'memoirs' (as they are commonly called) yet by a critical examination of the works of poets and novelists we shall very often find, running through the thread of their writings, reminiscences of their lives, amounting almost to autobiographies. Of this we have eminent examples in King David's Psalms, in Horace, and in Oliver Goldsmith; perhaps, also, in Thackeray and Lord Lytton. Reminiscences will crop up in spite of ourselves, and we can no more prevent this phenomenon, than could the heroes of Trafalgar and Waterloo, of a few years since, be prevented from 'fighting their battles o'er again.'