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In her face read the history of the future as it shall be sung and written by pens which shall not know whence their sharpened impulse springs; the page shall reflect the working of that woman's face, daughter of the people; and when exulting posterity shall draw new patriotism from it, and declare that it is proud, pathetic, resolved, sublime, they shall not yet call it by its Christian name, for that will be concealed with moss upon her forgotten head-stone.
So far as he had made any election within his breast, his choice inclined to the miserable Duke of Anjou; a prince whom he never came to know as posterity has known him, but whom he at least learned to despise. Thus far the worthless and paltry intriguer still wore the heroic mask, deceiving even such far seeing politicians as Saint Aldegonde and the Prince.
Whether the legend be true or not, posterity has cheered, for that brilliant victory really ended the war, although two years passed before peace was declared and the independence of the United States acknowledged by the King of England. Long before this, everybody knew what the end would be, and there was much discussion as to how the new country should be governed.
But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his to return now. "Do you think he will ever come back?" asked little Ned. "Stranger things have happened, my little man!" said Doctor Grimshawe, "than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these usurpers out of his rightful inheritance.
A plastic presentiment, to satisfy its creator, must fulfil two conditions; first it must record for posterity in forms of eternal resemblance all that lay in the nature of the person it represents; secondly, it must also show to posterity what the art of the time when it was executed, was capable of." "That is a matter of course but you are forgetting your own share." "My own fame you mean?"
Therefore, when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we wonder wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, but that of posterity.
At the same time Samuel Rutherford was not the man to take it for granted that John Gordon and his household were all saved and home in heaven because they lived within such sacred walls and were all church members and warm Covenanters. He was only the more anxious about the Gordon family because they had such an ancestry and were all bidding so fair to leave behind them such a posterity.
"Must we renounce even the honor of having voluntarily surrendered ourselves? Must we sacrifice all, even the opinion of posterity?" "There is vanity again," replied De Thou, placing his fingers on his lips. "But hush! let us hear the Abbe to the end."
Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt into a sound into thin air.... Not only a man's actions are effaced and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him also. His intellect only is immortal, and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever."
This is not the place for a thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character.
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