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318 developed itself, and ended before their very eyes. "You young people," slowly said an old mouse of stately and commanding presence, "you have only seen a single play—at best but a few—but I am grey, and have lived through many and marked them all with care. And I have found that in reality they are all alike, that they are generally variations on the same theme; and that very often the same situations, entanglements, and catastrophes are set before us. They are always the same men with the same passions, who only change costumes and figures of speech. There are always the same motives of action, love or hate, or ambition, or envy or jealousy, whether the hero wears a Roman toga or old German mail, a turban or a felt hat, and whether he speaks simply or in flowery verse, in bad iambics, or even worse trochees. The whole history of mankind, which people are so prone to divide into different dramas, acts and entrances, is after all one and the same story, only a masked come-round-again procession of the same natures and occurrences, an organic rotation in orbit, which begins anew from the same initial; and when one has once realised this, he no longer bewails the bad nor rejoices too readily over the good—he smiles at the folly of the heroes who sacrifice themselves for the perfection and prosperity of