ANTIQUITY

ANTIQUITY.

Consider, for example, and yon will find that almost nil the transactions in the time of Vespasian differed little from those of the present day. You there find marrying and giving in marriage, educating children, sickness, death, war, joyous holidays, traffic, agriculture, flatterers, insolent pride, suspicions, laying of| plots, longing for the death of others, newsmongers, lovers, misers, men canvassing for the consulship and for the kingdom; yet all these passed away, and are nowhere.—

Marcus Antoninus.

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.—Pascal.

All those things that are now held to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.—Tacitus.

Antiquity is a species of aristocracy with which it is not easy to be on visiting terms.— Madame Swetchine.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port to steer.—Burke.

Time's gradual touch has mouldered into beauty many a tower, which when it frowned with all its battlements was only terrible.—

Mason.

I do by no means advise you to throw away your time in ransacking, like a dull antiquarian, the minute and unimportant parts of remote and fabulous times. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.—Chesterjield.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other, but if they are nothing within themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.—Cotton.

It is one proof of a good education, and of

true refinement of feeling, to respect antiquity.—

Mrs. Sigourney.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou ? that, being nothing, art everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity,— then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou callcdst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thvself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion ? or what half Jan uses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we forever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! The past is everytliing, being nothing I

Lamb.

The pyramids, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.—Puller.

A thorough-paced antiquary not only remembers what all other people have thought proper to forget, but he also forgets what all other people think is proper to remember.—

Cotton.

Antiquity! I like its ruins better than it* reconstructions.—Joubert.

Those were good old times, it may be thought, when baron and peasant feasted together. But the one could not read, and made his mark with a sword-pommel, and the other was held as dear as a favorite dog. Pure and simple times were those of our grandfathers, it may be. Possibly not so pure as we may think, however, and with a simplicity ingrained with some bigotry and a good deal of conceit.— Chapin.

Time consecrates; and what is gray with age becomes religion.—Schiller.

What subsists to-day by violence continues to-morrow by acquiescence, and is perpetuated by tradition ; till at last the hoary abuse shakes the gray hairs of antiquity at us, and gives itself out as the wisdom of ages.—

Edward Everett.

He who professes adherence to the national religion of England, on the ground that " it is the religion of his fathers," forgets, as do the hearers who applauded the sentiment, that, on this principle, the worship of Thor and Woden would claim precedence.—

BisaopWJtately.

Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.—Chapin.