are to follow us. All this appears ridiculous when applied to inanimate matter; but we talk of death with the feelings of life, of another world with the inalienable affections of this. Montaigne says that the mind must be screwed to a high pitch to make it sensible of its own decay; how must it then be wound up to make it comprehend its own dissolution! Sense cannot understand its own insensibility, nor can consciousness conceive of its own unconsciousness; for we can no more project our understandings forward into our posthumous state, than we can cast them backwards into that which was ante-natal. Before the vital spark is extinct we throw its light into the grave; the only way in which it may consistently be said that 66 even in our ashes live their wonted fires."

How can we conceive of ourselves as inanimate, when it is much more difficult than is generally imagined to believe in the insensibility of external matter, to which we are perpetually attempting to impart our own sensitiveness. The child scolds, caresses, and reasons with its doll as if it were a rational being, occasionally beating the stool over which it has stumbled, and the floor upon which it has fallen, as if they were endued with feeling. "Men are but children of a larger growth:" Xerxes flogged and threw chains upon the sea, for wrecking his vessels; the poor Indian, whose untutored mind "sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind," considers the elements as the living ministers of his will; the Pagans in their beautiful mythology animated universal nature, vivifying the valleys, mountains, seas, rivers and trees, and bestowing

upon every spot, not otherwise appropriated, its local genius; Roman Catholics address their vows to statues, pictures, and relics, as the sensible representatives of an invisible prototype; poets of all countries and persuasions personify and apostrophise the external features of nature; and there is hardly a man in existence who has not vented his spleen upon some portion of offending matter as if it were sensible to his resentment, or soliloquised it in his happier moods as if it could sympathise with his complacency.

As many countries do not afford wood enough for their combustion, it is to be presumed that nature meant our bodies for interment; and yet that method of mouldering back into our constituent elements is loathsome and revolting to every sense of man. The ancient practice of cremation was more delicate, and fraught with more grateful associations: that portion of us which fire could consume ascended in the form of smoke to heaven; our less perishable remains, gathered from the funeral pyre, or preserved by the incombustible asbestos, were deposited in elegant vases and urns, to be consigned to the tomb, or sometimes enshrined among the domestic deities of the paternal dwelling. Cyrus, however, forbade this disposal of his body, or any other monument to be erected to his memory, thinking that this beautiful earth, with its majestic trees, delicious fruits, nodding flowers, and glorious overhanging firmament, formed a more magnificent tomb than any that the power of man could devise or execute. Cæsar and Alexander seem to have had no monuments; the sarcophagus

wherein the latter was supposed to have been inhumed cannot adduce any historical evidence in support of its pretensions. Pompey and Cato were in a similar predicament, while the barber of Augustus and the freedman of Claudius reposed beneath magnificent tombs.

Marmoreo Licinus tumulo jacet, at Cato parvo;
Pompeius nullo. Credimus esse Deos?-

MART.

The monuments of the ancients were mostly constructed by the sides of the high roads, but this varied according to the taste of the individual. Propertius gave the preference to a retired spot.

Dii faciant, mea ne terra locet ossa frequenti,
Qua facit assiduo tramite vulgus iter.

While Lollius inscribes upon his tomb,

Hic propter viam positus,

Ut dicant prætereuntes,

Lolli-vale!

Save me! save me, ye guardian spirits of the dead! from being interred in any of those civic cemeteries, cabined in with high windowless walls, where the earth, ever unvisited by the sun, is black and unctuous with the fermentation of accumulated remains; where the smoky tombstones are dank, desolate, and unperused, and human bones are left scattered upon the surface, as if in an unhallowed desert, while the desecrated enclosure perpetually rings with the yell of carmen, the rattling of wheels, the cries of hucksters, and all the profane hubbub of commercial life. We conceive not of the peace or the sleep of

death, amid this hurley-burley of the mart. Not that I have quite so lively a sense of death as the Parisian, who, standing upon the height of Père La Chaise, exclaimed, "What a pleasure to be buried in a spot which commands so fine a view of Paris !"-but that there seems something soothing and congenial in the thought of our last resting-place being sanctified by the holy, calm, and benign influences of rural nature.

In the middle ages, according to the eloquent authoress of Valperga, the family of the Soldanieri at Florence had a vast subterranean cemetery, admitting a dim light by a grating that communicated with the cloisters of the great church. It was their custom to coffin their dead warriors in brazen statues, made to imitate the living form and mien of the corpse within, armed cap-à-pié, and mounted astride brazen figures of horses, so that the population of this extensive receptacle resembled a party of armed knights ready for action. Viewed by torch-light, this assemblage must have formed a sight awfully solemn, and well according with the martial ferocity of an age, which would recall the fury and the passions of life even amid the peaceful silence of the tomb; but the philosopher would advert to the preposterous and presumptuous folly of these bloodless champions of the dust-these heroes of impotence, apparently spurring their brazen chargers into the other world, who, in spite of the tilted lance or brandished sword, were shrivelling up into skeletons, totally unable to defend themselves against the attacks of the worm that crawled within their helmets.

There are who deemed it sweet and glorious to lie upon the field of battle-to sleep in the bed of honour. Such is not my creed. I hold with the fat knight, "I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath." There have been brave men who yearned for a more serene resting-place. Lord Camelford habitually courted death; yet, in the few hurried moments that preceded the duel in which he fell, he found time to direct in his will that his body should be conveyed to a chosen spot in Switzerland, to be interred beneath two favourite trees, where he had sat and meditated, and heard those sacred whisperings of nature to which we have already alluded.

At the time of the Duke d'Enghien's execution, the writer composed some stanzas on the event, of which the following is one:

"The moonbeam gilds his pallid face,
Cold-cold he lies in death's embrace,
The forest is his burial place,

Unhallow'd is his grave :

His funeral dirge the breezes sigh,
The flowers his nodding plumes supply,

And monumental oaks on high

Their boughs for banners wave."

Such was the ideal he had formed.

Having since

visited this uninteresting spot, and seen the poor monument erected to his memory, he has had additional experience of the loss we often sustain by exchanging the coinage of imagination for the dull sterling of reality.

Few would choose the burial place of the philosopher Empedocles, who threw himself into the flaming