beautiful.«
    »And this you think should be forgiven?«
    »At all events, it is forgiven. The world loves a spice of wickedness. Talk
as you will about principle, impulse is more attractive, even when it goes too
far. The passions of youth, like unhooded hawks, fly high, with musical bells
upon their jesses, and we forget the cruelty of the sport in the dauntless
bearing of the gallant bird.«
    »And thus do the world and society corrupt the scholar!« exclaimed Flemming.
    Here the Baron rang, and ordered a bottle of Prince Metternich. He then very
slowly filled his pipe, and began to smoke. Flemming was lost in a day-dream.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

                                 Literary Fame

Time has a Doomsday-Book, upon whose pages he is continually recording
illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one
disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters, never to be effaced.
These are the high nobility of Nature, - Lords of the Public Domain of Thought.
Posterity shall never question their titles. But those whose fame lives only in
the indiscreet opinion of unwise men must soon be as well forgotten as if they
had never been. To this great oblivion must most men come. It is better,
therefore, that they should soon make up their minds to this, - well knowing
that, as their bodies must erelong be resolved into dust again, and their graves
tell no tales of them, so must their names likewise be utterly forgotten, and
their most cherished thoughts, purposes, and opinions have no longer an
individual being among men, but be resolved and incorporated into the universe
of thought. If, then, the imagination can trace the noble dust of heroes, till
we find it stopping a beer-barrel, and know that
 
Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
May stop a hole to keep the wind away, -
 
not less can it trace the noble thoughts of great men, till it finds them
mouldered into the common dust of conversation, and used to stop men's mouths,
and patch up theories, to keep out the flaws of opinion. Such, for example, are
all popular adages and wise proverbs, which are now resolved into the common
mass of thought; their authors forgotten, and having no more an individual being
among men.
    It is better, therefore, that men should soon make up their minds to be
forgotten, and look about them, or within them, for some higher motive, in what
they do, than the approbation of men