Discussing "The Last Man" By Mary Shelley

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "The Last Man," which was written by Mary Shelley and published in 1826.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Mary Shelley's Parents – Mary Wollstonecraft And William Godwin – and her Education
• 3:18 Mary's Relationship And Marriage With Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 4:18 Mary's Complicated Life And Other Writings
• 6:06 Science Fiction As A Reaction To The Industrial Revolution
• 8:49 Was Mary Shelley A One-Hit Wonder?
• 10:20 A Definition Of Science Fiction And Deciding Whether "The Last Man" Fits Into It
• 13:38 "The Last Man" As Dystopian Fiction
• 17:29 Biographical References And Other Examples Of "Last Man" Literature
• 19:14 "The Last Man" As Exploration Of Secular Eschatology
• 28:30 A Passage Reminding Us What Is At Stake

Transcript

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797 to two parents who were both reasonably well-known at the time and She would go on to become more famous than either of them. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft was a very early advocate of women's rights and she's best known for a book that she wrote called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792 and She argues in that book, Mary Shelley's mother does, that women are not naturally inferior to men. It only looks that way because they aren't able to get the education that men get and This woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 11 days after her daughter, Mary Shelley's birth So on the one hand, Mary Shelley didn't know her But it seems likely that her views had a significant impact on Mary Shelley's life and as a result the history of literature or at least the presence of this particular writer in the canon and Arguably the founding or maybe Stoking or encouraging of the whole genre of science fiction, but we'll get to that But that's a bit about Mary Shelley's mother Her father was William Godwin who was one of the first proponents of what we now call Utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism and from what I can see Godwin did not use The word utilitarianism in his writing though Jeremy Bentham who was a contemporary of his did Bentham is generally credited with coining that term and of course John Stuart Mill later Popularized it and I didn't actually read any Godwin So maybe he did use it but in the few things I looked at I didn't see it But we can still place him as part of that trend of thought in the late 18th and early 19th century He's apparently best known for two pieces of writing one is called an inquiry concerning political justice and the other things as they are and The first is a criticism of political institutions and the second is a mystery novel Apparently he also wrote something that I'm pretty curious about called the lives of the necromancers I have no idea what that is, but I found it and looking into his stuff I might check that out But for our purposes today what matters most is that William Godwin tried to give his daughter Mary a good Informal education. She still didn't have much of a formal education, but her father tutored her on a lot of subjects He tried to bring his children on trips He remarried and so Mary Shelley had a stepmother named Mary Jane Claremont And so just to make it confusing William Godwin's first wife his second wife and his daughter were all named Mary But anyway, his second wife had a daughter named Clara So Mary Shelley the daughter grew up with this other girl Clara But so William Godwin tried to bring them on outings. He tutored them He had his own personal library from which they could read and maybe most of all he had a circle of Intellectuals around him and so the young Mary Shelley enjoyed visits from people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge And maybe he would have done all this anyway But it seems likely that his first wife's ideas would have Influenced him to make sure that his daughter had a good education. And as a result, she became the writer that she was and among William Godwin's political followers was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and through Percy Bysshe Shelley Mary also met the poet Lord Byron and in 1814 Mary and Percy began a relationship and Percy was already married at the time and soon after Mary Percy and Mary's stepsister Clara who apparently as an adult went by Claire went on a trip through Europe and when they Returned Mary was pregnant with Percy's child and they spent the next two years Being ostracized and in debt and the baby was born prematurely and died and then in 1816 Percy's wife because remember he was still married Harriet committed suicide and then Mary and Percy got married and in this period Mary was about 16 and older and Percy was about 21 and older so you can put whatever Youthful indiscretion into this calculation that you want But one thing about Mary Shelley is that she did get pregnant by this married guy And I don't think it's a stretch to say that his wife committed suicide At least partially if not entirely as a result I haven't looked into Harriet's life and maybe there was more going on there But that certainly had to have played a role and then six years after they got married Percy Shelley died in a shipwreck but not before the two of them had four children and she also had a miscarriage that Almost killed her and of her four children only one of them ended up outliving her So her mother died basically in childbirth. She grew up with a stepmother. She had this affair She had four children a miscarriage her husband died three of her children died at various times but afterAfter Percy Shelley died, she just kept writing. She's best known, of course, for Frankenstein. And she wrote Matilda and Valperga, two other novels, when he was still alive. But then after, in 1826, four years after he died, the next novel that she wrote was what we're going to be looking at today, The Last Man. And then in 1830, she published Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. In 1835, something called Ledore. In 1837, a novel called Faulkner. And she had also written some travel writing and published collections of her late husband's poetry. And she died in 1851 in London. So she had this unusual education, this pretty vibrant intellectual life around her, paired with maybe a sort of complicated family life in her upbringing. She grew up with a stepmother, which is not necessarily complicated in every case, but it seems that there are many examples of it being difficult. And then everything complicated about her own marriage. These two things together, her education and her difficult family relations, maybe made her into the writer that she was. And of course, plenty of people go through the exact same thing and they don't become famous writers. But in Mary Shelley's case, she did. And today we're not talking about Frankenstein, but I'll just mention briefly, as I've said many times, that Frankenstein, which was Mary Shelley's first novel, is often taken as the starting point of modern science fiction. You can find examples of science fiction that is older than that. There are guys like Francis Godwin, Francis Bacon wrote The New Atlantis. Some people say Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels is a little bit science fiction. There are certainly older examples, but after Frankenstein, you can start to see a more rapid follow-up of other similar books in the same genre that continues up to the present day. There is a lot of 19th century science fiction. So while there might be these forerunners who earlier than Mary Shelley wrote some things that could qualify as science fiction, the broader culture wasn't quite ready to then light up the way that it was in the 19th century. And my view of science fiction is that it's to a great extent a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. You had earlier the Scientific Revolution. You had, as we've talked about, Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and Tycho Brahe. And that gets you to Newton and a hundred other guys in the 16th and 17th centuries who are reorganizing science. But my view of that is that it was more of an elite revolution, that that knowledge didn't spread to the masses the way that the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the steam engine and the railroad and these machines that you could see visibly in daily life and were affecting everybody's lives, that reached the popular level. And I think that's part of why science fiction took off in the 19th century, because you had lots and lots of people thinking about these new things or being made to think about them because of the emerging technology. Whereas the Scientific Revolution was not accompanied by technology to the same extent, or at least not by technology that was so publicly visible. There were telescopes and more advanced armillary spheres and astrolabes, but ordinary people didn't see those as much as they saw a train, for example, or they didn't work in a factory or near one or get a product that came from a factory or start to have their farming practices influenced by new tools. And so if you have, at the popular level, more people exposed to this stuff, then if we say in every thousand people, there's one person who might potentially write a novel, the likelihood that the potential novel writer sees the technology and thinks about it and is influenced by it and maybe worries about the future of it goes up a lot. So I think that 19th century science fiction is basically imagining and sometimes worrying about what all of these new machines and all of this new knowledge is going to mean for the future. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Maybe it's a little of both. And Frankenstein is certainly an example of that, but so is The Last Man. And I was very pleased to finally read this one because I had heard about it at least a couple years ago, and just the title intrigued me, and then I went and looked at the description and I liked that even more. But it's a little bit long and it took me some time to get to it, but now I've finally read it, and I'm pleased to say that it's also evaporated my fear that Mary Shelley may have been a one-hit wonder, that she's very famous for Frankenstein, which was partially inspired by a dream. And she was writing it in this summer where there was this weird geological event happening where a volcano erupted in Indonesia or something, I can't remember the details now. And so it was very dark and she was in Switzerland with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and she'd had this education from her father and everything just lined up perfectly. So she wrote this book, but then since she's not really known for any of her other books, or at least they're not household names, the way that, for example, at least five of Dickens' novels are household names, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, there's probably another I'm not thinking of. Since most people can't name another novel by Mary Shelley, I wondered if the rest of them just weren't very good, but I found The Last Man to be excellent.And it makes me want to read her other novels as well. And as I've mentioned before, in some books the course of the story and the potential spoilers matter more than in others. And there aren't really twists in this story, but it might be more enjoyable if you don't know what's gonna happen because it is a pretty mysterious book. So I am gonna do my best to talk about it without giving anything away. But in saying generally whether this is science fiction or not, it might be useful to get at a definition of science fiction. And one of the things I was thinking about recently is that what we call literary fiction or realist fiction, maybe, is the story of things that haven't happened literally in that exact form, but they very easily could. These are stories about families or neighborhoods or dramas between people. Those are things that could happen given the conditions of life as they are now. And when we talk about fantasy, for example, or the genre that's called fantasy, we maybe think of the Lord of the Rings and books like it. And what differentiates that genre is that it includes things that could not possibly happen given the world as we know it. It includes elves, which don't exist as far as we know. It includes magic, which basically doesn't exist, at least in the literal sense that it occurs in fantasy writing. I'm not talking about how pi seems like a magical number or things like that. I mean literally casting a spell kind of magic. And science fiction seems to be somewhere in between those two points. Modern science fiction seems to always include technology that doesn't yet exist, but seems like it potentially could or that we are on the cusp of it. And there are different levels of this. The technology in Star Wars is very removed. Not that Star Wars is necessarily science fiction. Maybe that's more space opera. But there is science fiction, even in the 19th century, that features technology that was way beyond what anyone had at the time. And then you have a TV show like Black Mirror that sometimes features technology that's almost what exists now, or is maybe only a slightly more advanced version of it. But it's somehow about an interaction with technology. And The Last Man doesn't really have that. For example, The Mummy, which was written by Jane Loudon and published only a year later in 1827, does. And maybe we'll look at that soon. That novel, written by another woman, has some examples of very futuristic technology. The Last Man doesn't really have that. But it does have a very deadly plague, which we could notice has happened in history. In the late 1340s, there was a very deadly plague that swept through Europe and killed some unknown but very large section of the population. But the plague in this book is even more deadly than that. And there is an element of science in the book. There is a secondary character who's kind of a scientist. And he's not a bumbler, but he's kind of detached. He's not involved in the fight against the plague or trying to develop an antidote to it or anything like that. He's lost in his calculations, thinking about other things. And people have pointed out how that scientist, the scientist in The Last Man, whose name is Merival, is very different from Frankenstein. Frankenstein is energetic, maniacal, maybe too capable. He's too competent for his own good. He shouldn't succeed in his project, but he does. Whereas Merival is not even thinking about the right problem. But for that reason, that I think The Last Man sits comfortably in this category of fiction of things that don't normally happen in the course of everyday life, but could possibly happen, I think puts it in the category of science fiction, or at least near it. And another thing is that it takes place in the late 21st century. So, it's a story about the future. And even if we could debate whether it's science fiction or not and what qualifies as science fiction, I think this is very comfortably dystopia. And normally, we think of dystopia as a subcategory of science fiction, because often, at least modern dystopian writing has to do with a very powerful state that has very dangerous technologies at its disposal. But I think you could have dystopia that's not science fiction. A dystopia is just the opposite of a utopia. It's a bad society. And we always imagine the future as involving technology, but it doesn't necessarily have to. And in this case, Mary Shelley is imagining 200 years in the future, but there aren't very significant technological changes. And the reason I think that it is very comfortably dystopia, whether you think of it as science fiction or not, is because it has lots of scenes that are among the first things that come into our minds when we think of dystopia. One kind of dystopia is the 1984 dystopia and everything in that category, which is sort of what I was just talking about, the state and technology. But another kind is that everything has fallen apart. And this is, of course, an example of the latter category. And you have lots of scenes of empty cities. And we looked at Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe, on this podcast. And that's an earlier book that, if I remember correctly, does sometimes mention how grass started to grow up in the streets because there was no...nobody on them. And that's not fiction or it's maybe partially fictionalized or it's not clear. It was written using a real journal, but then Defoe added some stuff to it. I go into that in more detail in that episode. If you want, you can go and listen to that. But he mentions those kinds of scenes just briefly in passing, whereas Shelley in this book really leans into them and really imagines them in a lot of detail. And that's very interesting as well. And it's for me, by far the oldest example of that, that I can think of where that's not only a detail in the story, but it's among the main settings. And the writer really imagines that setting in very vivid detail and tries to convey it. And also, if we were going to go back to dystopia as being a vision of the future, that's bad because of a government or because of science, there are aspects of the story in which people responsible don't take the action or the responsibility necessary to deal with the problem. And so then all the terrible things happen. And also there's the sort of cloud walking scientist who's too caught up in imaginary theoretical things to deal with the very concrete problem that's coming right at him. And so often we think of dystopia as resulting from activity of governments or scientists, but this might be an example of a dystopia resulting in passivity, that it's the lack of action on the part of the government or the scientists or whomever that results in this bad society. But the result is the same. And so I think it's fair to put it in the category of dystopia. And when I was reading some notes afterwards, I learned that some people have identified biographical details about Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron in certain characters in the novel. And I don't know quite enough about their biographies. I can think of one example that's pretty obvious about Lord Byron that I'm not going to explain because it's a little bit of a spoiler. But other than that, I can't really think of any. And you lose nothing, I think, in the enjoyment of the novel by not knowing any of that. In fact, if I went into it knowing that and saying, oh, here she's winking at the life of this person, that might kind of take me out of the story a little bit. So I don't mind not knowing that kind of thing. Maybe afterwards to learn it might be interesting, but when you're reading it, I think that sort of stuff sometimes inhibits my ability to really just kind of fall into a novel as a world that I'm enjoying. Though that stuff is interesting as well. I'm just saying that you don't need to know that background to enjoy this at all. It's totally enjoyable as a novel without any of that knowledge. But if we were going to make a movie trailer of this book, there's all kinds of stuff that you could put in there. There's a romance, there's politics, there's a siege of Constantinople of Istanbul. There are meteors and tidal waves. There's a cult that appears with a charismatic leader who's trying to manipulate people even as the world is coming apart. One thing that's worth mentioning if we were trying to put this book in its historical context is that at that time there were some other examples of last man type stories or even uses of that title. There is, for example, a novel published in 1805, a comfortable 21 years before Mary Shelley's book, and it has the same title. It was written in French by a writer whose name looks like Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Greenville. I'm not going to attempt the French pronunciation there. And that apparently wasn't properly translated into English until 2003, so it's relatively unknown in English. And de Greenville apparently committed suicide a few months before the book was published. But I'm curious about that one as well. Maybe I'll get to it someday. And aside from that, there's a poem by Thomas Campbell called The Last Man. And also Lord Byron has a poem called Darkness, which doesn't use the phrase The Last Man, but it evokes a similar kind of scene. So that's not to say that Shelley was copying these other people. Her book is very expansive and imagines this kind of scenario in a lot of detail, as I've said. But there were other people thinking about this kind of topic around that time. And I would be curious to look at de Greenville's. I don't know if it was completely different, if it's sort of similar. I don't know if she even would have read it. Apparently, there was a translation at the time, but it was not a very good translation at all. And one of the ways that people interpret this book is that it's a criticism actually of some of the romantic ideals that Shelley and the people around her espoused. The power of the individual, the power of humanity as a creative force imposing itself on the universe, or at least on the natural world on earth. In this book, the people are much less powerful than that. And a lot of their ideals are shown to be foolish in one way or another. But for me, I would put this story in a neighborhood with stories like The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells. Not because they're particularly similar in subject matter or style or depth, but they are ways in which fiction tries to get atsecular eschatology. What will the end of the world look like or what might it look like? And there are at least two ways to think about that topic. One is how that end must be inevitable in some sense. The end of the human species or even its distant evolutionary descendants who maybe are unrecognizable to us. And maybe even then we might say there's some point just as in the past we draw a demarcation and say homo sapiens started around this time and before that it was some pre homo sapien being. In the distant future there might be a point where hopefully scientists of a million years from now might say at that point we no longer were homo sapien and we became whatever. Hopefully we won't have devolved into something lower than what we are now, something less sentient, something less capable. And maybe that is one possible end. That's one of the possibilities that HG Wells outlines in The Time Machine. Or maybe if our descendants continue to develop in some way of which we would approve or at least in some way of which a being that has a bigger mind than we do would approve. That if we looked at our ancestors of a million years ago I'm not sure what they would think of us now. Biologically we're not unrecognizably different but we're a little bit different. In our behavior we're very different. But if they were to say you guys went in the wrong direction that by itself wouldn't be enough of a basis for saying that we did go in the wrong direction somehow in a long-term way. So us today disapproving of our ancestors a million years from now is not necessarily by itself evidence that they're on the wrong path. But hopefully they would continue to work towards long-term goals and if they decide that their goals are going to be different from ours that's different from having no goals at all. Or maybe they reach some stage of enlightenment and say goals are not the point, living tranquilly is the point for example. But that would still be something if somebody could explain it to us we might say oh now I see why you guys are doing that and that kind of makes sense. And I didn't even mean to get off in that detour yet so let's come back to that in a second. The first version of this is that even if human life continues basically indefinitely for 500 million years or a billion years you still eventually get to physicists say the heat death of the universe which is there being no energy left anywhere in the universe or no thermodynamic energy or no energy above the level required to make something happen. And this is one hypothesis about the future of the universe but it's one that some smart people subscribe to. If that is where the universe is heading how could our descendants survive it? Is it possible that they could? Would descendants so far in the future have any meaning for us? And if they couldn't survive it what does that mean for our lives? And because it may turn out there will be no heat death of the universe because physicists don't know everything and in a hundred years they'll say oh no that doesn't make sense and here's why. For that reason it might be unnecessary to think about these things but if we're trying to decide what our lives are about I think for now this thought has to be in there somewhere. And if you're religious you have an explanation for this problem. But if you're not it's sort of a tricky one to deal with because it essentially means that the ultimate destination of all human labor might just be this cold universe where nothing is happening and there's no life. And granting the possibility that this theory is wrong I think we can still say an individual life well-lived is worthwhile. It is better to live a good life whatever that means even though we all die in the end. And on the larger scale I think that it's better for humans if they occurred by some accident of evolution in this universe that doesn't even know they're there to use that energy over however many generations there are with dignity and intelligence and deliberation is better than to do otherwise even if no God ever sees it. The last man might say to himself well we had a good run we did what we could in this strange existence but we've now hit the absolute maximum and now we're going out. And even if nothing thereafter is ever aware that we ever existed if nothing is ever aware again of anything if there is such a thing as the heat death of the universe it is still worthwhile to live a deliberate creative productive healthy wholesome industrious disciplined life if nothing else in defiance of our circumstances if not in harmony with them in another way. So that's the first part of how I think about this topic that a book like the last man is trying to get at is that there may very well be some hard limit to human existence not even human civilization civilizations can rise and fall but humans at all human existence but Mary Shelley didn't know about the theory of heat death of the universe I don't think it existed at the time and she wasn't really talking about that she was talking about this second part of this question which is that while there may be a truly hard limit past which nohuman invention can secure survival. There are, before that distant and hypothetical point, millions and millions of much more tangible pitfalls. There are ways that we could end ourselves without the universe doing it to us irresistibly. The ones that come to mind most easily are things like nuclear war and plague, but there are many others. I think degeneracy is a real one, the decay and erosion of human behavior over time so that it descends to a level that's no longer self-sustaining in one way or another. I think H.G. Wells would have agreed. It makes me think of this word orthogenesis. This is this 19th century theory of biology, of evolution, that suggests that evolution is headed towards something, orthogenesis, ortho being straight and genesis being life. It's heading toward some good destination, that evolution heads upwards, it ascends naturally. And this is a defunct theory, biologists don't think this anymore, they just think the best spreading genes survive, whether they are good or bad. And we would do well to remember that there are no guardrails on this thing, not just human evolution, but civilization and society also. There is nobody supervising it and going, oh, it's really gotten out of control over here, we better rein it in. There is no orthogenesis, either socially or biologically, that's saying we are going to be on the correct path. We could just as easily be off of it, we could just as easily be plunging downward. And even if we're not doing that today, if we look at everything we're doing and we say, no, this is all just fine, we don't need to change any of it, we are on the right path. Tomorrow, we might get off of it. This is something we have to be vigilant about. And if we're talking not only about social decay or cultural rot, we also should not be too comfortable about the knowledge that we have. One of the things that's going on in this novel, and this won't be giving away too much, the medicine of the time is unable to deal with the plague. It hadn't advanced enough when the buzzer sounded. It was too late. The plague is here, science can't deal with it. And we don't necessarily know what the next thing will be. And the next thing might be something that was brought on by science and technology. Not that it'll be AI, but it might be, who knows, some weird computer virus that destroys all the financial markets. And so now nobody can buy anything for some reason that nobody except a handful of people in the world understand. And that doesn't matter because everything falls apart almost immediately. That's just a hypothetical. And the point is not any given scenario, but that we should perhaps have an urgency in our knowledge seeking that we don't always have. That science and math were originally tools for survival. Astronomy, which is among the oldest sciences, was connected to agriculture, which is obviously directly connected to survival because it's how people get food. And today we don't view science in the same way most of the time. We don't view it as the sandbags that we are stacking up against the flood that could roll in one way or another from the depths of the dark and chaotic universe against the possibility of which we should always be preparing. And among other things, I think a book like The Last Man reminds us that that is a more accurate depiction of what it actually is. It's not merely interesting or engaging or an intellectual pursuit or a nice profession. Accurate knowledge of real world phenomena in many different fields, in physics and biology and medicine, but also in fields like political science and in sociology. Our diligence and rigor and competence and accuracy and honesty in these fields will probably in the long term be the determining factor in the lifespan of humanity as a whole. And as always, I marked off a lot of stuff that I would have liked to have shown you, but I'm just going to read one medium to long passage here from Mary Shelley's The Last Man. And all that you really need to know is that the context is some of what we've just been talking about. Things falling apart. Here's a passage to remind us of what's at stake. Shelley writes, quote, Farewell to the patriotic scene, to the love of liberty and well-earned mead of virtuous aspiration. Farewell to crowded senate, vocal with the counsels of the wise whose laws were keener than the sword blade tempered at Damascus. Farewell to kingly pomp and warlike pageantry. The crowns are in the dust and the wearers are in their graves. Farewell to the desire of rule and the hope of victory, to high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise and the craving for the suffrage of their fellows. The nations are no longer. No senate sits in counsel for the dead. No scion of a time honored dynasty pants to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house. The general's hand is cold and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields. Unhonored though in youth. The marketplace is empty. The candidate for popular favor finds none whom he can represent. To chambers of painted state, farewell. To midnight revelry and the panting emulation of beauty, to costly dress and birthday show, to title and the gilded carnet, farewell. Farewell to the giant powers of man, to knowledge that could pilot the deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shore.powerless ocean, to science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air, to the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters and set in motion wheels and beams and vast machinery that could divide rocks of granite or marble and make the mountains plain. Farewell to the arts, to eloquence, which is to the human mind as the winds to the sea, stirring and then allaying it. Farewell to poetry and deep philosophy, for man's imagination is cold and his inquiring mind can no longer expatiate on the wonders of life, for there is no work nor device nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest. To the graceful building, which in its perfect proportion transcended the rude forms of nature, the fretted, gothic, and massy Saracenic pile, to the stupendous arch and glorious dome, the fluted column with its capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle, and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to the ear. Farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks human flesh and in the plastic expression of the cold excellencies of the human shape shines forth the god. Farewell to painting, the high-wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artist's mind in pictured canvas. To paradisaical scenes where trees are ever vernal and the ambrosial air rests in perpetual low. To the stamped form of tempest and wildest uproar of universal nature encaged in the narrow frame. Oh, farewell! Farewell to music and the sound of song, to the marriage of instruments, where the concord of soft and harsh unites in sweet harmony and gives wings to the panting listeners, whereby to climb heaven and learn the hidden pleasures of the eternals. Farewell to the well-trod stage, a truer tragedies enacted on the world's ample scene that puts to shame mimic grief. To high-bred comedy and the low buffoon farewell. Man may laugh no more. Alas, to enumerate the adornments of humanity shows by what we have lost how supremely great man was. It is all over now. He is solitary. Like our first parents expelled from paradise, he looks back towards the scene he has quitted. Skipping ahead, England. Late birthplace of excellence and school of the wise, thy children are gone, thy glory faded. Thou, England, wert the triumph of man. Small favor was shown thee by thy creator, thou Isle of the North, a ragged canvas naturally, painted by man with alien colors, but the hues he gave are faded, never more to be renewed. So we must leave thee, thou marvel of the world. We must bid farewell to thy clouds and cold and scarcity forever. Thy manly hearts are still, thy tale of power and liberty at its close. Bereft of man, O little Isle, the ocean waves will buffet thee and the raven flap his wing, wings over thee. Thy soil will be birthplace of weeds, thy sky will canopy barrenness. It was not for the rose of Persia thou wert famous, nor the banana of the east, not for the spicy gales of India, nor the sugar groves of America, nor for thy vines, nor thy double harvest, nor for thy vernal airs, nor solstitial sun, but for thy children, their unwearied industry and lofty aspiration. They are gone, and thou goest with them, the oft-trodden path that leads to oblivion." And I'll leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.