His eye kept watch too constantly over man's mortality. He told the people of Bristol on one occasion that Burke's exclamation, "What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue!" summed up "the life of every politician and perhaps of every man." Behind all his exterior urbanity and humour lay this haunting sense of transience, and, while to the world he seemed like some polished eighteenth-century grandee, at heart he was the Calvinist of seventeenth-century Scotland.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "His eye kept watch too constantly over man's mortality. He told the people of Bristol on one occasion that Burke's exclamation, "What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue!" summed up "the life of every politician and perhaps of every man." Behind all his exterior urbanity and humour lay this haunting sense of transience, and, while to the world he seemed like some polished eighteenth-century grandee, at heart he was the Calvinist of seventeenth-century Scotland." in the context of "John Buchan, Men and Deeds (1935), pp. 287-288" to mean that wisdom is timeless.