"And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?"

The sentiments and opinions here uttered are in unison with those expressed in the following Essay upon Epitaphs, which was furnished by the author for Mr. Coleridge's periodical work, The Friend; and as they are dictated by a spirit congenial to that which pervades this and the twa succeeding books, the sympathising reader will not be displeased to see the essay here annexed.

ESSAY UPON EPITAPIS.

IT needs scarcely be said, that an epitaph presupposes a monument, upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all nations have wished that certain external signs should point out the places where their dead are interred. Among savage tribes unacquainted with letters, this has mostly been done either by rude stones placed near the graves, or by mounds of earth raised over them. This custom proceeded obviously from a twofold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation: and, secondly, to preserve their memory. Never any, says Camden, "neglected burial but some savage nations: as the Bactrians, which cast their dead to the dogs; some varlet philosophers, as Diogenes, who desired to be devoured of fishes; some dissolute courtiers, as Mæcenas, who was wont to say, "Non tumulum curo; sepelit natura relictos."

I'm careless of a grave. nature her dead will save."

As soon as nations had learned the use of letters, epitaphs were inscribed upon these monuments; in order that their intention might be more surely and adequately fulfilled. I have derived monuments and epitaphs from two sources of feeling: but these do in fact resolve themselves into one. The invention of epitaphs, Weever, in his Discourse of Funeral Monuments, says rightly, "proceeded from the presage or fore-feeling of immortality, implanted in all men naturally, and is referred to the scholars of Linus the Theban poet, who flourished about the year of the world two thousand seven hundred; who first bewailed this Linus their master, when he was slain, in doleful verses, then called of him Elina, afterwards epitaphia, for that they were first sung at burials, after engraved upon the sepulchres.

And, verily, without the consciousness of a principle of immortality in the human soul, man could never have had awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows: mere love, or the yearning of kind towards kind, could not have produced it. The dog or horse perishes in the field, or in the stall, by the side of his companions, and is incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot preconceive this regret, he can form no thought of it, and therefore cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance behind him. Add to the principle of love, which exists in the inferior animals, the faculty of reason which exists in man alone; will the conjunction of these account for the desire? Doubtless it is a necessary consequence of this conjunction: yet not I think as a direct result, but only to be come at through an intermediate thought, viz. That of an intimation or assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable. At least the precedence, in order of birth, of one feeling to the other, is unquestionable. If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual being, the mind was without this assurance; whereas the wish to be remembered by our friends or kindred after death, or even in absence, is, as we shall discover, a sensation that does not form itself till the social feelings have been developed, and the reason has connected itself with a wide range of objects. Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature, is endowed; who should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the child; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him! Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of nature, though he may have forgotten his former self, ever noticed this early, obstinate, and unappeasable inquisitiveness of children upon the subject of origination? This single fact proves outwardly the monstrousness of those suppos tions: for, if we had no direct external testimony that the minds of very young children meditate feelingly upon death and immortality, these inquiries, which we all know they are perpetually making concerning the whence, do necessarily include correspondent habits of interrogation concerning the whither Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: "Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?" And the spirit of the answer must have been, though the word might be sea or ocean, accompanied perhaps with an image gathered from a map, or from the real object in nature-these might have been the letter, but the spirit of the answer must have been as inevitably,-a receptacle without bounds or dimensions:-nothing less than infinity. We may, then, be justified in asserting, that the sense of immortality, if not a co existent and twain birth with reason, is among the earliest of her offspring and we may further assert, that from these conjoined and under their countenance, the human affections are gradually formed and opened out. This is not the place to enter into the recesses of these investigations; but

the subject requires me here to make a plain avowal, that, for my own part, it is to me inconceivable, that the sympathies of love towards each other, which grow with our growth, could ever attain any new strength, or even preserve the old, after we had received from the outward senses the impression of death, and were in the habit of having that impression daily renewed and its accompanying feeling brought home to ourselves, and to those we love; if the same were not counteracted by those communications with our internal being, which are anterior to all these experiences, and with which revelation coincides, and has through that coincidence alone (for otherwise it could not possess it) a power to affect us. I confess, with me the conviction is absolute, that, if the impression and sense of death were not thus counterbalanced, such a hollowness would pervade the whole system of things, such a want of correspondence and consistency, a disproportion so astounding betwixt means and ends, that there could be no repose, no joy. Were we to grow up unfostered by this genial warmth, a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of love; and infinitely less could we have any wish to be remembered after we had passed away from a world in which each man had moved about like a shadow-If, then, in a creature endowed with the faculties of foresight and reason, the social affections could not have unfolded themselves uncountenanced by the faith that man is an immortal being; and if, consequently, neither could the individual dying have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his fellows, nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve for future times vestiges of the departed: it follows, as a final inference, that without the belief in immortality, wherein these several desires originate, neither monuments nor epitaphs, in affectionate or laudatory commemoration of the deceased, could have existed in the world.

We

Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange country, found the corse of an unknown person, lying by the sea-side he buried it, and was honoured throughout Greece for the piety of that act. Another ancient philosopher, chancing to fix his eyes upon a dead body, regarded the same with slight, if not with contempt; saying, " See, the shell of the flown bird! But it is not to be supposed that the moral and tender-hearted Simonides was incapable of the lofty movements of thought, to which that other sage gave way at the moment while his soul was intent only upon the indestructible being; nor, on the other hand, that he, in whose sight a lifeless human body was of no more value than the worthless shell from which the living fowl had departed, would not, in a different mood of mind, have been affected by those earthly considerations which had incited the philosophic poet to the performance of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter we may be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability of communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature, he would have cared no more for the corse of the stranger than for the dead body of a seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the waves. respect the corporeal frame of man, not merely because it is the habitation of a rational, but of an immortal soul. Each of these sages was in sympathy with the best feelings of our nature; feelings which, though they seem opposite to each other, have another and a finer connection than that of contrast. It is a connection formed through the subtle progress by which, both in the natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their contraries, and things revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon the orb of this planet, a voyage towards the regions where the sun sets, conducts gradually to the quarter where we have been accustomed to behold it come forth at its rising; and, in like manner, a voyage towards the east, the birthplace in our imagination of the morning, leads finally to the quarter where the sun is last seen when he departs from our eyes; so the contemplative soul, travelling in the direction of mortality, advances to the country of everlasting life; and, in like manner, may she continue to explore those cheerful tracts, till she is brought back, for her advantage and benefit, to the land of transitory things-of sorrow and of tears.

On a midway point, therefore, which commands the thoughts and feelings of the two sages whom we have represented in contrast, does the author of that species of composition, the laws of which it is our present purpose to explain, take his stand. Accordingly, recurring to the twofold desire of guarding the remains of the deceased and preserving their memory, it may be said that a sepulchral monument is a tribute to a man as a human being; and that an epitaph, (in the ordinary meaning attached to the word) includes this general feeling and something more; and is a record to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his individual worth, for a satisfaction to the sorrowing hearts of the survivors, and for the common benefit of the living: which record is to be accomplished, not in a general manner, but, where it can, in close connection with the bodily remains of the deceased; and these, it may be added, among the modern nations of Europe are deposited within, or contiguous to their places of worship. In ancient times, as is well known, it was the custom to bury the dead beyond the walls of towns and cities; and among the Greeks and Romans they were frequently interred by the waysides.

I could here pause with pleasure, and invite the reader to indulge with me in contemplation of the advantages which must have attended such a practice. We might ruminate upon the beauty which the monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the surrounding images of naturefrom the trees, the wild flowers, from a stream running perhaps within sight or hearing, from the beaten road stretching its weary length hard by. Many tender similitudes must these objects have presented to the mind of the traveller leaning upon one of the tombs, or reposing in the coolness of its shade, whether he had halted from weariness or in compliance with the invitation, "Pause, traveller!" so often found upon the monuments. And to its epitaph also must have been supplied strong appeals to visible appearances or immediate inipressions, lively and affecting

analogies of life as a journey-death as a sleep overcoining the tired wayfarer-of misfortune as a storm that falls suddenly upon him-of beauty as a flower that passeth away, or of innocent pleasure as one that may be gathered-of virtue that standeth firm as a rock against the beating waves; of hope "undermined insensibly like the poplar by the side of the river that has fed it," or blasted in a moment like a pine-tree by the stroke of lightning upon the mountain-top-of admonitions and heart-stirring remembrances, like a refreshing breeze that comes without warning, or the taste of the waters of an unexpected fountain. These, and similar suggestions, must have given, formerly, to the language of the senseless stone a voice enforced and endeared by the benignity of that nature with which it was in unison. -We, in modern times, have lost much of these advantages; and they are but in a small degree counterbalanced to the inhabitants of large towns and cities, by the custom of depositing the dead within, or contiguous to, their places of worship; however splendid or imposing may be the appearance of those edifices, or however interesting or salutary the recollections associated with them. Even were it not true that tombs lose their monitory virtue when thus obtruded upon the notice of men occupied with the cares of the world, and too often sullied and defiled by those cares, yet still, when death is in our thoughts, nothing can make amends for the want of the soothing influences of nature, and for the absence of those types of renovation and decay, which the fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and contemplative mind. To feel the force of this sentiment, let a man only compare in imagination the unsightly manner in which our monuments are crowded together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless churchyard of a large town, with the still seclusion of a Turkish cemetery, in some remote place, and yet further sanctified by the grove of cypress in which it is erbosomed. Thoughts in the same temper as these have already been expressed with true sensibility by an ingenuous poet of the present day. The subject of his poem is "All Saints' Church, Derby:" he has been deploring the forbidding and unseemly appearance of its burial-ground, and uttering a wish, that in past times the practice had been adopted of interring the inhabitants of large towns in the country:-

"Then in some rural, calm, sequestered spot,
Where healing nature her benignant look
Ne'er changes, save at that lorn season, when,
With tresses drooping o'er her sable stole,
She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man,
Her noblest work (so Israel's virgins erst,
With annual moan upon the mountains wept
Their fairest gone), there in that rural scene,
So placid, so congenial to the wish
The Christian feels, of peaceful rest within
The silent grave, I would have strayed:

-wandered forth, where the cold dew of heaven
Lay on the humbler graves around, what time
The pale moon gazed upon the turfy mounds,
Pensive, as though like me, in lonely muse,
Twere brooding on the dead inhumed beneath.
There while with him, the holy man of Uz,
O'er human destiny I sympathized,
Counting the long, long periods prophecy
Decrees to roll, ere the great day arrives
Of resurrection, oft the blue-eyed spring
Had met me with her blossoms, as the dove,
Of old, returned with olive leaf, to cheer

The patriarch mourning over a world destroyed:
And I would bless her visit; for to me

"Tis sweet to trace the consonance that links
As one, the works of nature and the word
Of God.'

JOHN EDWARDS.

A village churchyard, lying as it does in the lap of nature, may indeed be most favourably contrasted with that of a town of crowded population: and sepulture therein combines many of the best tendencies which belong to the mode practised by the ancients, with others peculiar to itself. The sensations of pious cheerfulness, which attend the celebration of the Sabbath-day in rural places, are profitably chastised by the sight of the graves of kindred and friends, gathered together in that general home towards which the thoughtful yet happy spectators themselves are journeying. Hence a parish church, in the stillness of the country, is a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead; a point to which are habitually referred the nearest concerns of

both.

As, then, both in cities and in villages, the dead are deposited in close connection with our places of worship, with us the composition of an epitaph naturally turns, still more than among

the nations of antiquity, upon the most serious and solemn affections of the human mind; upon departed worth-upon personal or social sorrow and admiration-upon_religion, individual and social-upon time, and upon eternity. Accordingly, it suffices, in ordinary cases, to secure a composition of this kind from censure, that it contains nothing that shall shock or be inconsistent with this spirit. But to entitle an epitaph to praise, more than this is necessary. It ought to contain some thought or feeling belonging to the mortal or immortal part of our nature touchingly expressed, and if that be done, however general or even trite the sentiment may be, every man of pure mind will read the words with pleasure and gratitude. A husband bewails a wife; a parent breathes a sigh of disappointed hope over a lost child: a son utters a sentiment of filial reverence for a departed father or mother; a friend perhaps inscribes an encomium recording the companionable qualities, or the solid virtues, of the tenant of the grave, whose departure has left a sadness upon his memory. This, and a pious admonition to the living, and a humble expression of a hristian confidence in immortality, is the language of a thousand churchyards; and it does not Gen happen that anything, in a greater degree discriminate or appropriate to the dead or to the ling, is to be found in them. This want of discrimination has been ascribed by Dr. Johnson, in hisessay upon the Epitaphs of Pope, to two causes; first, the scantiness of the objects of human prae; and, secondly, the want of variety in the characters of men; or, to use his own words, to he fact, that the greater part of mankind have no character at all." Such language may be holds without blame among the generalities of common conversation; but does not become a critic nd a moralist speaking seriously upon a si us subject. The objects of admiration in humanature are not scanty, but abundant and every man has a character of his own, to the eye tha has skill to perceive it. The real cause of the acknowledged want of discrimination in sepulchil memorials is this-that to analyse the characters of others, especially of those whom we love, not a common or natural employment of men at any time. We are not anxious unerringly to derstand the constitution of those minds who have soothed, who have cheered, who have supp-ted us; with whom we have been long and daily pleased or delighted. The affections are their on justification. The light of love in our hearts is a satisfactory evidence that there is a body of wor in the minds of our friends or kindred, whence that light has proceeded. We shrink from the thought of placing their merits and defects to be weighed against each other in the nice balance of pu intellect; nor do we find much temptation to detect the shades by which a good quality or virt, is discriminated in them from an excellence known by the same general name as it exists in the ind of another; and, least of all, do we incline to these refinements when under the pressure of row, admiration, or regret, or when actuated by any of those feelings which incite men to prong the memory of their friends and kindred, by records placed in the bosom of the all-uniting an equalising receptacle of the dead.

The first requis, then, in an epitaph is, that it should speak, in a tone which shall sink into the heart, the gene language of humanity as connected with the subject of death-the source from which an epita proceeds; of death and of life. To be born and to die are the two points in which all men feel hemselves to be in absolute coincidence. This general language may be uttered so strikingly to entitle an epitaph to high praise; yet it cannot lay claim to the highest unless other excellens be superadded. Passing through all intermediate steps, we will attempt to determine at once at these excellences are, and wherein consists the perfection of this species of composition. It wile found to lie in a due proportion of the common or universal feeling of humanity to sensations cited by a distinct and clear conception, conveyed to the reader's mind, of the individual, whose eath is deplored and whose memory is to be preserved; at least of his character as, after death, appeared to those who loved him and lament his loss. The general sympathy ought to be ackened, provoked, and diversified, by particular thoughts, actions, images-circumstances of ge, occupation, manner of life, prosperity which the deceased had known, or adversity to whi he had been subject; and these ought to be bound together and solemnized into one harmor by the general sympathy. The two powers should temper, restrain, and exalt each other. The der ought to know who and what the man was whom he is called upon to think of with interest A distinct conception should be given (implicitly where it can, rather than explicitly) of the ividual lamented. But the writer of an epitaph is not an anatomist who dissects the internal fran of the mind, he is not even a painter who executes a portrait at leisure and in entire tranquillit his delineation, we must remember, is performed by the side of the grave; and, what is more, e grave of one whom he loves and admires. What purity and brightness is that virtue clothed the image of which must no longer bless our living eyes! The character of a deceased friend or loved kinsman is not seen, no-nor ought to be seen, otherwise than as a tree through a tender h, or a luminous mist, that spiritualizes and beautifies it: that takes away indeed, but only to thind that the parts which are not abstracted may appear more dignified and lovely, may impress affect the more. Shall we say, then, that this is not truth, not a faithful image; and that accingly the purposes of commemoration cannot be answered? It is truth, and of the highest orde for, though doubtless things are not apparent which did exist yet, the object being looked through this medium, parts and proportions are brought into distinct view, which before had been ly imperfectly or unconsciously seen it is truth hallowea by love-the joint offspring of the wo of the dead and the affections of the living? This may easily be brought to the test. Let on whose eyes have been sharpened by personal hostility to disover what was amiss in the charactf a good man, hear the tidings of his death, and what a