Being less than the custom-house farmers gave him; Whose sacrilege plundered the stones from Paul's. So here in court, church, and country, far and wide, Clarendon-House was a palace, which had been raised with at least as much fondness as pride; and Evelyn tells us, that the garden was planned by himself and his lordship; but the cost, as usual, trebled the calculation, and the noble master grieved in silence amidst this splendid pile of architecture.* Even when in his exile the sale was proposed to pay his debts, and secure some provision for his younger children, he honestly tells us, that he remained still so infatuated with the delight he had enjoyed, that though he was deprived of it, he hearkened very unwillingly to the advice.' In 1683 Clarendon-House met its fate, and was abandoned to the brokers, who had purchased it for its materials. An affecting circumstance is recorded by Evelyn on this occasiou. In returning to town with the Earl of Clarendon, the son of the great earl, 'in passing by the glorious palace his father built but few years before, which they were now demolishing, being sold to certain undertakers, I turned my head the contrary way till the coach was gone past by, least I might minister occasion of speaking of it, which must needs have grieved him, that in so short a time this pomp was fallen.' A feeling of infinite delicacy, so perfectly characteristic of Evelyn! er. And now to bring down this subject to times still nearWe find that Sir Robert Walpole had placed himself exactly in the situation of the great minister we have noticed; we have his confession to his brother Lord Walpole, and to his friend Sir John Hynde Cotton. The historian of this minister observes, that his magnificent buildings at Houghton drew on him great obloquy. On seeing his brother's house at Wolterton, Sir Robert expressed his wishes that he had contented himself with a similar structure. In the reign of Anne, Sir Robert sitting by Sir John Hynde Cotton, alluding to a sumptuous house which was then building by Hariey, observed, that to construct a great house was a high act of imprudence in any minister! It was a long time after, when he had become prime minister, that he forgot the whole result of the present article. and pulled down his family mansion at Houghton to build its magnificent edifice; it was then Sir John Hynde Cotton reminded him of the reflection which he had made some years ago: the reply of Sir Robert is remarkable Your recollection is too late; I wish you had reminded me of it before I began building, for then it might have been of service to me!' The statesman and politician then are susceptible of all the seduction of ostentation and the pride of pomp! Who could have credited it? But bewildered with power, in the magnificence and magnitude of the edifices whch their colossal greatness inhabits, they seem to contemplate on its image! Sir Francis Walsingham died and left nothing to pay his debts, as appears by a curious fact noticed in the anonymous life of Sir Philip Sidney prefixed to the Arcadia, and evidently written by one acquainted with the family history of his friend and hero. The chivalric Sidney, though sought after by court beauties, solicited the hand of the daughter of Walsingham, although, as it appears, she could have had no other portion than her own virtues and her father's name. And herein,' observes our anonymous biographer, he was exemplary to all gentlemen not to carry their love in their purses.' On this he notices this secret history of Walsingham. "This is that Sir Francis who impoverished himself to enrich the state. and indeed made England his heir; and was so far from building up of fortune by the benefit of his place, that he demolished that fine estate left by his ancestors to purchase dear intelligence from all parts of Christendom. He had a key to unlock the pope's cabinet; *At the gateway of the Three King's Inn, near Doverstreet, in Piccadilly, are two pilasters with Corinthian capitals, which belonged to Clarendon-House, and are perhap the only remains of that edifice. and as if master of some invisible whispering-place, all the secrets of christian princes met at his closet. Wonder not then if he bequeathed no great wealth to his daughter, be ing privately interred in the quire of Paul's as much indebted to his creditors, though not so much as our nation is in debted to his memory.' Some curious inquirer may afford us a catalogue of great ministers of state who have voluntarily declined the augmentation of their private fortune, while they devoted their days to the noble pursuits of patriotic glory! The labour of this research will be great, and the volume small! TAXATION NO TYRANNY! Such was the title of a famous political tract, sent forth at a moment when a people, in a state of insurrection, put forth a declaration that taxation was tyranny! It was not against an insignificant tax they protested, but against taxation itself! and in the temper of the moment this abstract proposition appeared an insolent paradox. It was instantly run down by that everlasting party which, so far back as in the laws of our Henry the First, are designated by the odd descriptive term of acephali, a people without heads!* the strange equality of levellers! These political monsters in all times have had an association of ideas of taxation and tyranny, and with them one name instantly suggests the other! This happened to one Gigli of Sienna, who published the first part of a dictionary of the Tuscan language,t of which only $12 leaves amused the Florentines; these having had the honour of being consigned to the flames by the hands of the hangman for certain popular errors; such as, for instance, under the word Gram Duca we find Vedi Gobelli! (see Taxes!) and the word Gabella was explained by a reference to Gran Duca! Grand-Duke and tazes were synonymes, according to this mordacious lexicographer! Such grievances, and the mode of expressing them, are equally ancient. A Roman consul, by levying a tax on salt during the Punic war, was nick-named salinator, and condemned by the majesty' of the people! He had formerly done his duty to the country, but the salter was now his reward! He retired from Rome, let his beard grow, and by his sordid dress, and melancholy air, evinced his acute sensibility. The Romans at length wanted the salter to command the army-as an injured man, he refused-but he was told that he should bear the caprice of the Roman people with the tenderness of a son for the humours of a parent! He had lost his reputation by a productive tax on salt, though this tax had provided an army and obtained a victory! Certain it is that Gigli and his numerous adherents are wrong; for were they freed from all restraints as much as if they slept in forests and not in houses: were they inhabitants of wilds and not of cities, so that every man should be his own law-giver, with a perpetual immunity from all taxation, we could not necessarily infer their political happiness. There are nations where taxation is hardly known, for the people exist in such utter wretchedness, that they are too poor to be taxed; of which the Chinese, among others, exhibit remarkable instances. When Nero would have abolished all taxes, in his exces. sive passion for popularity, the senate thanked him for his good will to the people, but assured him that this was a certain means not of repairing, but of ruining the commonwealth. Bodin, in his curious work the Republic,' has noticed a class of politicians who are in too great favour with the people. Many seditious citizens, and desirous of innovations, did of late years promise immunity of taxes and subsidies to our people; but neither could they do it, or if they could have done it, they would not; *Cowel's Interpretor, art. Acephali. This by name we unexpectedly find in a grave antiquarian law-dictionary! pro bably derived from Pliny's description of a people whom some travellers had reported to have found in this predicament, in their fright and haste in attempting to land on a hostile shore among the savages. How it came to be introduced into the laws of Henry the First remains to be told by sume profound antiquary; but it was common in the middle ages. Cowel says. Those are called acephali who were the levellers of that age, and acknowledged no head or superior. +Vocabulario di Santa Caterina e della Lingua Sanese, of the Court of Florence. 1717. This pungent lexicon was prohibited at Rome hy desire The history of this suppressed work may be found in Il Giornale de' Letterati d' Italia, Teme xxix-1410. In the last edition of Haym's Biblioteca Itali ana,' 1803, it is said to be reprinted at Manilla, nell' Isloe Fillippine! For the book-licensers it is a great way to go for it or if it were done, should we have any commonweale, being the ground and foundation of one.' The undisguised and naked term of taxation' is, however, so odious to the people, that it may be curious to observe the arts practised by governments, and even by the people themselves, to veil it under some mitigating term. In the first breaking out of the American troubles, they probably would have yielded to the mother-country the right of taxation, modified by the term regulation (of their trade; this I infer from a letter of Dr. Robertson, who observes, that the distinction between taration and regulation is mere folly! Even despotic governments have condescended to disguise the contributions forcibly levied, by some appellative which should partly conceal its real nature. Terms have often influenced circumstances, as names do things; and conquest or oppression, which we may allow to be synonymes, apes benevolence whenever it claims as as a what it exacts as a tribute. A sort of philosophical history of taxation appears in the narrative of Wood, in his inquiry on Homer. He tells us that the presents (a term of extensive signification in the East) which are distributed annually by the bashaw of Damascus to the several Arab princes through whose territory he conducts the caravan of pilgrims to Mecca, are, at Constantinople, called a free gift, and considered as an act of the sultan's generosity towards his indigent subjects; while, on the other hand, the Arab sheikhs deny even a right of passage through the districts of their command, and exact those sums as a tax due for the permission of going through their country. In the frequent bloody contests which the adjustment of these fees produce, the Turks complain of robbery, and the Arabs of invasion.'* Here we trace taxation through all its shifting forms accommodating itself to the feelings of the different people; the same principle regulated the alternate terms proposed by the buccaneers, when they asked what the weaker party was sure to give, or when they levied what the others paid only as a common toll. When Louis the Eleventh of France beheld his country exhausted by the predatory wars of England, he bought a peace of our Edward the Fourth by an annual sum of fifty thousand crowns, to be paid at London, and likewise granted pensions to the English ministers. Holingshead and all our historians call this a yearly tribute; but Comines, the French memoir writer, with a national spirit, denies that these gifts were either pensions or tributes. Yet,' says Bodin, a Frenchman also, but affecting a more philosophical indifference, it must be either the one or the other; though I confess, that those who receive a pension to obtain peace, commonly boast of it as if it were a tribute!'I Such are the shades of our feelings in this history of taxation and tribute. But there is another artifice of applying soft names to hard things, by veiling a tyrannical act by a term which presents no disagreeable idea to the imagination. When it was formerly thought desirable, in the relaxation of morals which prevailed in Venice to institute the office of censor, three magistrates were elected bearing this title; but it seemed so harsh and austere in that dissipated city, that these reformers of manners were compelled to change their title; when they were no longer called censors, but I signori sopra il bon vivere della citta, all agreed on the propriety of the office under the softened term. Father Joseph the secret agent of Cardinal Richelien, was the inventor of letters de catchet, disguising that instrument of despotism by the amusing term of a sealed letter. Expatriation would have been merciful compared with the result of that billet-dour, a sealed letter from his majesty! Burke reflects with profound truth-Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point which, by way of eminence, becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taring. Most of the contests in the ancient common *Bodin's six books of a Commonwealth, translated by Richard Knolles, 1606. A work replete with the practical knowl. edge of politics; and of which Mr Dugald Steward has deli. vered a high opinion. Yet this great politician wrote a volume to anathematize those who doubted the existence of sorcerers, and witches, &c, whom he condemns to the flames! See his Demonomaine des Sorciers, 1593. + Wood's Inquiry on Homer, p, 133. 1006. Bodia's Common-weale, translated by R. Knolles, p. 148. wealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.'* One party clamorously asserts that taxation is their grievance, while another demonstrates that the annihilation of taxes would be their ruin! The interests of a great nation, among themselves, are often contrary to each other, and each seems alternately to predominate and to decline. 'The sting of taxation,' observs Mr Hallam, 'is wastefulness; but it is difficult to name a limit beyond which taxes will not be borne without impatience when faithfully applied.' In plainer words, this only signifies, we presume, that Mr Hallem's party would tax us without 'wastefulness! Minsterial or opposition, whatever be the administration, it follows that Taxation is no tyranny;" Dr Johnson then was terribly abused in his day for a vox et prætera nihila. Suil shall the innocent word be hateful, and the people will turn even on their best friend, who in administration inflicts a new impost; as we have shown by the fate of the Roman Salinator! Among ourselves, our government, in its constitution, if not always in its practice, long had a consideration towards the feelings of the people, and often contrived to hide the nature of its exactions, by a name of blandishment. An enormous grievance was long the office of purveyance. A purveyor was an officer who was to furnish every sort of provision for the royal house, and sometimes for great lords, during their progresses or journeys. His oppressive office, by arbitrarily fixing the market-prices, and compelling the countrymen to bring their articles to market, would enter into the history of the arts of grinding the labouring class of society; a remnant of feudal tyranny! The very title of this officer became odious; and by a statute of Edward III, the hateful name of purveyor was ordered to be changed into acheteur or buyer! A change of name, it was imagined, would conceal its nature! The term often devised strangely contrasted with the thing itself. Levies of money were long raised under the pathetic appeal of benevolences. When Edward IV was passing over to France, he obtained, under this gentle demand, money towards the great journey,' and afterwards having rode about the more part of the lands, and used the people in such fair manner, that they were liberal in their gifts; Old Fabian adds, the which way of the levying of this money was after-named a benevolence.' Edward IV was courteous in this newly-invented style, and was besides the handsomest tax-gatherer in his kingdom! His royal presence was very dangerous to the purses of his loyal subjects, particularly to those of the females. In his progress, having kissed a widow for having contributed a larger sum than was expected from her estate, she was so overjoved at the singular honour and delight that she doubled her benevolence, and a second kiss had ruined her! but in the succeeding reign of Richard III, the term had already lost the freshness of its innocence. In the speech which the Duke of Buckingham delivered from the Hustings in Guildhall, he explained the term to the satisfaction of his auditors, who even then were as cross-humoured as the livery of this day, in their notions of what now we gently call supplies. Under the plausible name of benevolence, as it was held in the time of Edward IV, your goods were taken from you much against your will, as if by that name was understood that every man should pay not what he pleased, but what the king would have him;" or, as a marginal note in Buck's Life of Richard III, more pointedly has it, that the name of benevolence signified that every man should pay, not what he of his own good will list, but what the king of his good will list to take.'* Richard III, whose business, like that of all usurpers, was to be popular, in a statute even condemns this benevolence' as a new imposition.' and enacts that 'none shall be charged with it in future; many families having been ruined under these pretended gifts. *Burke's Works, vol. i. 288. Daines Barrington, in Observations on the Statutes,' gives the marginal note of Buck as the words of the Duke; they certainly served his purpose to amuse, better than the veracious ones; but we expect from a grave antiquary inviolable authenticity. The Duke is made by Barrington a sort of wit, but the pithy quaintness is Buck's. a be His successor, however, found means to levy nevolence; but when Henry VIII demanded one, the citizens of London appealed to the act of Richard III. Cardinal Wolsey insisted that the law of a murderous usurper should not be enforced. One of the commoncouncil courageously replied, that King Richard, conjointly with parliament, had enacted many good statutes.' Even then the citizen seems to have comprehended the spirit of our constitution—that taxes should not be raised without consent of parliament! Charles the First, amidst his urgent wants, at first had hoped, by the pathetic appeal to benevolence, that he should have touched the hearts of his unfriendly commoners; but the term of benevolence proved unlucky. The resisters of taxation took full advantage of a significant meaning, which had long been lost in the custom; asserting by this very terin that all levies of money were not compulsory, but the voluntary gifts of the people. In that political crisis, when in the fullness of time all the national grievances, which had hitherto been kept down, started up with one voice, the courteous term strangely contrasted with the rough demand. Lord Digby said the granting of subsidies, under so preposterous a name as of a benevolence, was-a malevolence.' And Mr Grimstone observed, that They have granted a benevolence, but the nature of the thing agrees not with the name.' The nature indeed had so entirely changed from the name, that when James I had tried to warm the hearts of his 'benevolent' people, he got little money, and lost a great deal of love.' 'Subsidies,' that is, grants made by parliament, observes Arthur Wilson, a dispassionate historian, get more of the people's money, but exactions enslave the mind.' When benevolences had become a grievance, to diminish the odium they invented more inviting phrases. The subject was cautiously informed that the sums demanded were only loans; or he was honoured by a letter under the privy seal; a bond which the king engaged to repay at a definite period; but privy seals at length got to be hawked about to persons coming out of church. Privy seals,' says a manuscript letter, are flying thick and threefold in sight of all the world, which might surely have been better performed in delivering them to every man privately at home.' The general loan, which in fact was a forced loan, was one of the most crying grievances under Charles I. Ingenious in the destruction of his own popularity, the king contrived a new mode, of secret instructions to commissioners. They were to find out persons who could bear the largest rates. How the commissioners were to acquire this secret and inquisitorial knowledge appears in the bungling contrivance. It is one of their orders that after a number of inquiries have been put to a person, concerning others who had spoken against loan-money, and what arguments they had used, this person was to be charged in his majesty's name, and upon his allegiance, not to disclose to any other the answer he had given. striking instance of that fatuity of the human mind, when a weak government is trying to do what it knows not how to perform it was seeking to obtain a secret purpose by the most open and general means; a self-destroying principle! : A Our ancestors were children in finance; their simplicity has been too often described as tyranny! but from my soul do I believe, on this obscure subject of taxation, that oid Burleigh's advice to Elizabeth includes more than all the squabbling pamphlets of our political economists-' win hearts, and you have their hands and purses!' THE BOOK OF DEATH. Montaigne was fond of reading minute accounts of the deaths of remarkable persons; and, in the simplicity of his heart, old Montaigne wished to be learned enough to form a collection of these deaths, to observe their words, their actions, and what sort of countenance they put upon it.' He seems to have been a little over curious about deaths, in reference, no doubt, to his own, in which he was certainly deceived; for we are told that he did not die as he had promised himself,-expiring in the adoration of the mass; or, as his preceptor Buchanan would have called it, in the act of rank idolatry.' I have been told of a privately printed volume, under the singular title of The Book of Death,' where an amateur has compiled the pious memorials of many of our eminent men in their last moments: and it may form a These Private Instructions to the Commissioners for the General Loan' may be found in Rushworth, i, 418. companion-piece to the little volume on Les grands home mes qui sont morts en plaisantant.' This work, I fear, must be monotonous; the deaths of the righteous must resemble each other; the learned and the eloquent can only receive in silence that hope which awaits the covenant of the grave.' But this volume will not establish any decisive principle; since the just and the religious have not always encountered death with indifference, nor even in a fit composure of mind. The functions of the mind are connected with those of the body. On a death-bed a fortnight's disease may reduce the firmest to a most wretched state; while, on the contrary, the soul struggles, as it were in torture, in a robust frame. Nani, the Venetian historian, has curiously described the death of Innocent X, who was a character unblemished by vices, and who died at an advanced age, with too robust a constitution. Dopo lunga e terribile agonia, con dolore e con pensa, seperandosi l'anima da quel corpo robusto, egli spiro ai sette di Genuaro, nel ottantesimo primo de suoi anno. After a long and terrible agony, with great bodily pain and difficulty, his soul separated itself from that robust frame, and expired in his eighty-first year.' Some have composed sermons on death, while they passed many years of anxiety, approaching to madness, in contemplating their own. The certainty of an immediate separation from all our human sympathies may, even on a death-bed, suddenly disorder the imagination. The great physician of our times told me of a general, who had often faced the cannon's mouth, dropping down in terror, when informed by him that his disease was rapid and fatal. Some have died of the strong imagination of death. There is a print of a knight brought on the scaffold to suffer; he viewed the headsman; he was blinded, and knelt down to receive the stroke. Having passed through the whole ceremony of a criminal execution, accompanied by all its disgrace, it was ordered that his life should be spared,instead of the stroke from the sword, they poured cold wa ter over his neck. After this operation the knight remained motionless; they discovered that he had expired in the very imagination of death! Such are among the many causes which may affect the mind in the hour of its last trial. The habitual associations of the natural character are most likely to prevail-though not always! The intrepid Marshal Biron disgraced his exit by womanish tears, and raging imbecility; the virtuous Erasmus, with misera ble groans was heard crying out Domine! Domine! fae finem! fac finem! Bayle having prepared his proof for the printer, pointed to where it lay when dying. The last words which Lord Chesterfield was heard to speak were, when the valet opening the curtains of the bed, announced Mr Dayroles Give Dayroles a chair!" "This goodbreeding,' observed the late Dr Warren his physician, only quits him with his life.' The last words of Nelson were, Tell Collingwood to bring the fleet to an anchor. The tranquil grandeur which cast a new majesty over Charles the First on the scaffold, appeared when he de clared- I fear not death! Death is not terrible to me! And the characteristic pleasantry of Sir Thomas More exhilarated his last moments, when observing the weakness of the seaffold, he said, in mounting it, I pray you see me up safe, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself! Sir Walter Raleigh passed a similar jest when going to the scaffold. My ingenious friend Dr Sherwen has furnished me with the following anecdotes of death. In one of the bloo dy battles fought by the Duke of Enghien, two French noblemen were left wounded among the dead on the field of battle. One complained loudly of his pains, the other after long silence thus offered him consolation. friend, whoever you are, remember that our God died on the cross, our king on the scaffold; and if you have strength to look at him who now speaks to you, you will see that both his legs are shot away.' My At the murder of the Duke D'Enghien, the royal victim looking at the soldiers who had pointed their fusees, said, 'Grenadiers! lower your arms, otherwise you will miss, or only wound me! To two of them who proposed to tie a handkerchief over his eyes, he said, A loyal soldier who has been so often exposed to fire and sword, can see the approach of death with naked eyes, and without fear.' After a similar caution on the part of Sir George Lisle, or Sir Charles Lucas, when murdered in nearly the same manner at Colchester, by the soldiers of Fairfax, the loyal N ey LITERATURE. ro in answer to their assertions and assurances that would take care not to miss him, nobly replied You ve often missed me when I have been nearer to you in "e field of battle.' When the governor of Cadiz, the Marquis de Solano, as murdered by the enraged and mistaken citizens, to he of his murderers who had run a pike through his back, e calmly turned round and said, Coward to strike there! Some round, if you dare-face, and destroy me!' Mr Abernethy in his Physiological Lectures has ingeiously observed, that 'Shakspeare has represented Merutio continuing to jest, though conscious that he was morally wounded; the expiring Hotspur thinking of nothing ut honour; and the dying Falstaff still cracking his jests #pon Bardolph's nose. If such facts were duly attended , they would prompt us to make a more liberal allowance or each other's conduct under certain circumstances than ve are accustomed to do.' The truth seems to be, that whenever the functions of the mind are not disturbed by the nervous functions of the digestive organs,' the perasonal character predominates even in death, and its haual associations exist to its last moments. Many religious persons may have died without showing in their last moments any of those exterior acts, or employing those yarfervent expressions, which the collector of The Book of Death' would only deign to chronicle; their hope is not gathered in their last hour. Yet many with us have delighted to taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnelhouse is the scene of their pleasure. The Midnight Meditations of Quarles preceded Young's Night Thoughts' by a century, and both these poets loved preternatural terror. 'If I must die, I'll snatch at every thing Into my soul such useful thoughts of death, QUARLES. But it may be doubtful whether the thoughts of death are useful, whenever they put a man out of the possession of Young pursued the scheme of Quarles: he his faculties. raised about him an artificial emotion of death; he darkened his sepulchral study, placing a skull on his table by lamp-light; as Dr Donne had his portrait taken, first winding a sheet over his head and closing his eyes; keeping this melancholy picture by his bed-side as long as he lived, to remind him of his mortality. Young even in his garden had his conceits of death: at the end of an avenue was viewed a seat of an admirable chiaro oscuro, which, when approached, presented only a painted surface, with an inscription, alluding to the deception of the things of this world. To be looking at 'The mirror which flatters not;' to discover ourselves only as a skeleton with the horrid life of corruption about us, has been among those penitential inventions, which have often ended in shaking the innocent by the pangs which are only natural to the damned. Without adverting to those numerous testimonies, the diaries of fanatics, I shall offer a picture of an accomplished and innocent lady, in a curious and unaffected transcript she has left of a mind of great sensibility, where the preternatural terror of death might perhaps have hastened the premature one she suffered. From the Reliquiæ Gethinianæ. I quote some of Lady Gethin's ideas on 'Death.'- The very thoughts of death disturb one's reason; and though a man may have many excellent qualities, yet he may have the weakness of not commanding his sentiments. Nothing is worse for one's health, than to be in fear of death. There are some so wise, as neither to hate nor fear it; but for my part I have an aversion for it, and with reason; for it is a rash inconsiderate thing, that always comes before it is looked for; always comes unseasonably, parts friends, ruins beauty, laughs at youth, and draws a dark veil over all and the pleasures of life. This dreadful evil is but the evil of a moment, and what we cannot by any means avoid; Blacks was the term for mourning in James the First and My discovery of the nature of this rare volumo, of what No. 11. it is that which makes it so terrible to me; for were it un- Such is the picture of an ingenuous and a religious mind, It may be a question whether those who by their pre- are alone, I confide my secret: on rising this morning, La Place was strongly affected by this appeal-neither Socrates, nor Cato, nor Seneca looked more serenely on the approach of death. Familiarize yourself early with death!' said the good old man with a smile-It is only dreadful for those who dread it!' During ten days after this singular conversation, the whole of Moncriff's remaining life, his apartment was open to his friends, of whom several were ladies; all kinds of games were played till nine o'clock, and that the sorrows of the host might not disturb his guests, he played the chouette at his favourite game of picquet: a supper, seasoned by the wit of the master, concluded at eleven. On the tenth night, in taking leave of his friend, Moncriff whispered to him, Adieu, my friend! to-morrow morning I shall return your books! He died, as he foresaw, the following day. I have sometimes thought that we might form a history of this fear of death, by tracing the first appearances of the skeleton which haunts our funeral imagination. In the modern history of mankind we might discover some very strong contrasts in the notion of death entertained by men at various epochs. The following article will supply a sketch of this kind. HISTORY OF THE SKELETON OF DEATH. Enthanasia! Enthanasia! an easy death! was the exclamation of Augustus; it was what Antonius Pius enjoyed; and it is that for which every wise man will pray, said Lord Orrery, when perhaps he was contemplating on the close of Swift's life. The ancients contemplated death without terror, and met it with indifference. It was the only divinity to which they never sacrificed, convinced that no human being could turn aside its stroke. They raised altars to fever, to misfortune, to all the evils of life; for these might change! But though they did not court the presence of death in any shape, they acknowledged its tranquillity; and in the beautiful fables of their allegorical religion, Death was the daughter of Night, and the sister of Sleep; and ever the friend of the unhappy! To the eternal sleep of death they dedicated their sepulchral monuments-Eternali Somno!* If the full light of revelation had not yet broken on them, it can hardly be denied that they had some glimpses and a dawn of the life to come, from the many allegorical inventions which describe the transmigration of the soul. A butterfly on the extremity of an extinguished lamp, held up by the messenger of the Gods intently gazing above, implied a dedication of that soul; Love, with a melancholy air, his legs crossed, leaning on an inverted torch, the flame thus naturally extinguishing itself, elegantly denoted the cessation of human life; a rose sculptured on a sarcophagus, or the emblems of epicurean life traced on it, in a skull wreathed by a chaplet of flowers, such as they wore at their convivial meetings, a flask of wine, a patera, and the small bones used as dice; all these symbols were indirect allusions to death, veiling its painful recollections. They did not pollute their imagination with the contents of a charnel-house. The sarcophagi of the ancients rather recall to us the remembrance of the activity of life; for they are sculptured with battles or games, in basso relievo; a sort of tender homage paid to the dead, observes Mad. De Stael, with her peculiar refinement of thinking. The artists of antiquity have so rarely attempted to personify Death, that we have not discovered a single revolting image of this nature in all the works of antiquity-to conceal its deformity to the eye, as well as to elude its suggestion to the mind, seems to have been an universal feeling, and it accorded with a fundamental principle of ancient art; that of never offering to the eye a distortion of form in the violence of passion, which destroyed the beauty of its representation; such is shown in the Laocoon, where the mouth only opens sufficiently to indicate the suppressed agony of superior humanity, without expressing the loud cry of vulgar suffering. Pausanias considered as a personification of death a female figure, whose teeth and nails, long and crooked, were engraven on a coffin of cedar, which enclosed the body of Cypselus; this female was unquestionably only one of the Parce, or the Fates, watchful to cut the thread of life; Hesiod describes Atropos indeed as having sharp teeth, and long nails, waiting to tear and devour the dead; but this image was in a barbarous era. Catullus ventured to personly the Sister-Destinies as three Crones; but in general, Winkelman observes, they are portrayed as beauuful virgins, with winged heads, one of whom is always in the attitude of writing on a scroll.' Death was a nonentity to the ancient artist. Could he exhibit what represents nothing? Could he animate into action what lies in a state of eternal tranquillity? Elegant images of repose and tender sorrow were all he could invent to indicate the state of death. Even the terms which different nations have bestowed on a burial-place are not associated with emotions of horror. The Greeks called a burying-ground by the soothing term of Cametrion, or, the sleeping-place? the Jews, who had no horrors of the grave, by Bethanim, or the house of the living the Germans, with religious simplicity, God's field.' Whence, then, originated that stalking skeleton, suggesting so many false and sepulchral ideas, and which for us has so long served as the image of death? When the christian religion spread over Europe, the world changed! the certainty of a future state of exist ence, by the artifices of wicked worldly men, terrified instead of consoling human nature; and in the resurrection the ignorant multitude seemed rather to have dreaded retribution, than to have hoped for remuneration. The Founder of christianity every where breathes the blessedness of social feelings. It is our Father! whom he addresses. The horrors with which christianity was afterwards disguised arose in the corruptions of christianity among those insane ascetics, who, misinterpreting the word of life,' trampled on nature; and imagined that to secure an existence in the other world it was necessary not to exist in the one in which God had placed them. The dominion of mankind fell into the usurping hands of those imperious monks whose artifices trafficked with the terrors of ignorant and hypochondriac' Keisers and kings." The scene was darkened by penances and by pilgrimages, by midnight vigils, by miraculous shrines, and bloody flagellations; spectres started up amidst their tenebres; miltons of masses increased their supernatural influence. Amidst this general gloom of Europe, their troubled amaginations were frequently predicting the end of the world. It was at this period that they first beheld the grave yawn, and Death in the Gothic form of a gaunt anatomy parading through the universe! The people were frightened, as they viewed every where hung before their eves, in the twilight of their eathedrals, and their pale cloisters,' the most revolting emblems of death. They startled the traveller on the bridge; they stared on the sinner in the carvings of his table and chair; the spectre moved in the hangings of the apartment; it stood in the niche, and was the picture of their sitting-room; it was worn in their rings, while the illuminator shaded the bony phantom in the margins of their hora,' their primers, and their breviaries. Their barbarous taste perceived no absurdity in giving action to a heap of dry bones, which could only keep to It would seem that the Romans had even an aversion to mention death in express terms, for they disguised its very name by some periphrasis, such as discessit e vita, 'he has departed from life;' and they did not say that their friend had died, but that he had lived; vixit! In the old Latin chronicles, and even the Fadera and other documents of the middle ages, we find the same delicacy about using the fatal word Death, especially when applied to kings and great people. Transire a Sæculo-Vitam suam mutare-Si quid de co humanitus contigerit, &c. I am indebted to Mr Merivale for this remark. Even among a people less refined, the obtrusive idea of death has been studiously avoided: we are told that when the Emperor of Morocco inquires after any one who has re-gether in a state of immovability and repose; nor that it cently died, it is against etiquette to mention the word 'death; the answer is his destiny is closed! But this tenderness is only reserved for the elect' of the Musselmen. A Jew's death is at once plainly expressed,' He is dead, sir! asking your pardon for mentioning such a contemptible wretch i. e. a Jew! A Christian's is described by The infidel is dead!' or 'The cuckold is dead!' * Montfaucon, L'Antiquité Expliquée, I, 362. was burlesquing the awful idea of the resurrection, by ex * A representation of Death by a skeleton appears among the Egyptians; a custom more singular than barbarous prevailed, of enclosing a skeleton of beautiful workmanship in a small coffin, which the bearer carried round at their entertainments; observing, after death you will resemble this figure: drink then! and be happy a symbol of Death in a convivial party was not designed to excite terrific or gloomy ideas. |