As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the bark—some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.

What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of immortality—terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.

If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet its name down the centuries. CÆsar wrote his Commentaries to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi monumentum Ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration—

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had written a song of a sparrow—

And in this bush one sparrow built her nest

Of which I sang one song that will not die.

Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.

Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. “Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of me comes but once in centuries.”

Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he said grandly; “I quit the time.” And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”

But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life? Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true, suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.

Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:—

For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (Oh, you rogue!) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (”You were drunk last night, you dog“), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.

We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of “Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two thousand—or it may be three thousand—yes, let us do the thing handsomely and not stint the centuries—in the year three thousand and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for democracy—at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the Patagonian capital—swished, I need hardly remark, being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired—bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages of the ancient British capital—those passages which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.

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An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch, marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha—a gentleman with a flowing beard and a dome-like brow—that overlooks the market-place, and places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells and a salvo of artillery.

There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the poem in which he poured out his creed—

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small.

That dares not put it to the touch

To win or lose it all.

MÆcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with Octavius CÆsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.”

“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give Mr ———— £200 and a commission to send your name echoing down the corridors of time.

Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr ———— (you will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain MarÉchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.

But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the world babbles about us for ever.

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