By the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve months; and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manœuvring king–remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more than his usual good humour in the famous ‘I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying.’

An unconscionable time a-dying–there is the picture (‘I am afraid, gentlemen,’) of your life and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours are ‘numbered and imputed,’ and the days go by; and when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else? The very length is something, if we reach that hour of separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how the veterans mutinied in the German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to go home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums. Sunt lacrymœ rerum: this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.