All passes. ART alone Enduring stays to us: The Bust out-lasts the throne,— The Coin, Tiberius. - Austin Dobson

A retrospect of the Eighteenth-Century Essayists subsequent to the ',' ',' and ',' only serves to confirm the supremacy of Addison and Steele. Some of their successors approached them in serious writing; others carried the lighter kinds to considerable perfection; but none (Goldsmith alone excepted) really rivaled them in that happily mingling of the lively and severe, which Johnson envied but could not emulate.

And round about its gray, time-eaten brow
Lean letters speak—a worn and shattered row:
I am a Shade: a Shadowe too arte thou:
I marke the Time: saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?

Old books, old wine, old Nankin blue;—
All things, in short, to which belong
The charm, the grace that Time makes strong,—
All these I prize, but (entre nous)
Old friends are best.