Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded.

This is Shakspeare's.
The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.

A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died.

Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter.

Here is the span of Napoleon's career;--the tree doesn't seem to have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section.