senators, he should be able positively to foretell his death from exhaustion on the morrow.
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“Why, I was writing of my epitaph ; It will be seen to-morrow ; my long sickness Of health, and living, now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.” After mocking the senators with the pretented patriotism of a public benefit, copied from the short notice to be found in Plutarch, the invitation forsooth to the Athenian citizens to
stop their afflictions by hanging themselves upon his tree, Timon takes his farewell of men and their deeds, in words
pointing to a voluntary death, in a prepurposed time and place. “Tim. Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood; Whom once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover; thither come, And let my grave-stone be your oracle.—
Lips, let sour words go by, and language end : What is amiss, plague and infection mend Graves only be men's works; and death their gain Sun, hide thy beams | Timon hath done his reign. Suicide had not that place of honour among the Greeks, which it afterwards obtained among the Romans, and at the present day, has among that remote and strange people the Japanese. Yet the duty of living and bearing one's burden manfully was not fully recognised until a better religious faith instructed us, that this life is but a state of preparation for another. The suicide of Timon, whether it is effected by exposure and want, or by more direct means, has no motive recognised by the ancients as an excuse, and can only be attributed to the suggestions of a diseased mind. Whether Shakespeare intended in Timon to describe the ca reer of a madman is a question on which it is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to come to a definite conclusion. The chief objection to the affirmative would be, that all satire upon the hollowness
