"Fain would I see that prodigal,

Who his to-morrow would bestow,

For all old Homer's life, e'er since he died, till now."

We do not believe the poet sincere, for one passion may prevail over another, and in many a breast the love of fame is at times, if not always, the strongest. But if those who pass their lives in a struggle for glory may desire the attainment of their object at any price, the competitors for political power are apt to cling fast to the scene of their rivalry. Lord Castlereagh could indeed commit suicide; but it was not from disgust; his mind dwelt on the precarious condition of his own elevation, and the unsuccessful policy in which he had involved his country. He did not love death; he did not contemplate it with indifference; he failed to observe its terrors, because his attention was absorbed by apprehensions which pressed themselves upon him with unrelenting force.

The ship of the Marquis of Badajoz, Viceroy of Peru, was set on fire by Captain Stayner. The marchioness, and her daughter, who was betrothed to the Duke of Medina-Celi, swooned in the flames, and could not be rescued. The marquis resigned himself also to die, rather than survive with the memory of such horrors. It was not that he was careless of life; the natural feelings remained unchanged; the love of grandeur, the pride of opulence and dominion; but he preferred death, because that was out of sight, and would rescue him from the presence of absorbing and intolerable sorrows.

Madame de Sévigné, in her charming letters, gives the true sensations of the ambitious man when suddenly called to leave the scenes of his efforts and his triumphs. Rumor, with its wonted credulity, ascribed to Louvois, the powerful minister of Louis XIV, the crime of suicide. His death was sudden, but not by his own arm; he fell a victim, if not to disease, to the revenge of a woman. In a night the most energetic, reckless statesman in Europe, passionately fond of place, extending his influence to every cabinet, and embracing in his views the destiny of continents, was called away. How much business was arrested in progress! how many projects defeated! how many secrets buried in the silence of the grave! Who should disentangle the interests which his policy had rendered complicate? Who should terminate the wars which he had begun? Who

should follow up the blows which he had aimed? Well might he have exclaimed to the angel of death: "Ah, grant me a short reprieve; spare me till I can check the Duke of Savoy; checkmate the Prince of Orange!"-" No! no! You shall not have a single, single minute." Death is as inexorable to the prayer of ambition as to the entreaty of despair. The ruins of the Palatinate, the wrongs of the Huguenots, were to be avenged; and Louvois, like Louis XI and like the rest of mankind, was to learn that the passion for life, whether expressed in the language of superstition, of abject despondency, or of the desire of continued power, could not prolong existence for a moment.

But, though the love of life may be declared a universal instinct, it does not follow that death is usually met with abjectness. It belongs to virtue and to manliness to accept the inevitable decree with firmness. It is often sought voluntarily, but even then the latent passion is discernible. A sense of shame, a desire of plunder, a hope of emolument-these, not less than a sense of duty, are motives sufficient to influence men to defy all danger; yet the feeling tor self-preservation does not cease to exert its power. The common hireling soldier contracts to expose himself to the deadly fire of a hostile army whenever his employers may command it; he does it, in a controversy of which he knows not the merits, for a party to which he is essentially indifferent, for purposes which, perhaps, if his mind were enlightened, he would labor to counteract. The life of the soldier is a life of contrast; of labor and idleness; it is a course of routine, easy to be endured, and leading only at intervals to exposure. The love of ease, the certainty of obtaining the means of existence, the remoteness of peril, conspire to tempt adventurers, and the armies of Europe have never suffered from any other limit than the wants of the treasury. But the same soldier would fly precipitately from any hazard which he had not bargained to encounter. The merchant will visit the deadliest climates in pursuit of gain; he will pass over regions where the air is known to be corrupt, and disease to have anchored itself in the hot, heavy atmosphere. And this he will attempt repeatedly, and with firmness, in defiance of the crowds of corpses which he may see carried by wagon-loads to the graveyards. But the same merchant would be struck

by panic and desert his own residence in a more favored clime, should it be invaded by epidemic disease. He who would fearlessly meet the worst forms of a storm at sea, and take his chance of escaping the fever as he passed through New Orleans, would shun New York in the season of the cholera, and shrink from any danger which was novel and unexpected. The widows of India ascend the funeral-pile with a fortitude which man could never display, and emulously yield up their lives to a barbarous usage which, if men had been called upon to endure it, would never have been perpetuated. Yet is it to be supposed that these unhappy victims are indifferent to the charms of existence, or blind to the terrors of its extinction? Calmly as they may lay themselves upon the pyre, they would beg for mercy were their execution to be demanded in any other way; they would confess their fear were it not that love and honor and custom confirm their doom.

No class of men in the regular discharge of duty incur danger more frequently than the honest physician. There is no type of malignant maladies with which he fails to become acquainted, no hospital so crowded with contagion that he dares not walk freely through its wards. His vocation is among the sick and the dying; he is the familiar friend of those who are sinking under infectious disease; and he never shrinks from the horror of observing it under all its aspects. He must do so with equanimity; as he inhales the poisoned atmosphere he must coolly reflect on the medicines which may mitigate the sufferings that he cannot remedy. Nay, after death has ensued, he must search with the dissecting-knife for its hidden cause, if so by multiplying his own perils he may discover some alleviation for the afflictions of others. And why is this? Because the physician is indifferent to death? Because he is steeled and hardened against the fear of it? Because he despises or pretends to despise it? By no means. It is his especial business to value life, to cherish the least spark of animated existence. And the habit of caring for the lives of his fellow-men is far from leading him to an habitual indifference to his own. The physician shuns every danger but such as the glory of his profession commands him to defy.

Thus we are led to explain the anomaly of suicide, and reconcile the apparent contradiction of a terror of death, which is yet

voluntarily encountered. It may seem a paradox; but the dread of dying has itself sometimes prompted suicide, and the man who seeks to destroy himself at the very moment of perpetrating his crime betrays the passion for life. Menace him with death under a different form from that which he has chosen, and, like other men, he will get out of its way. He will defend himself against the assassin, though he might be ready to cut his own throat; he will, if at sea, and the ship were sinking in a storm, labor with his whole strength to save it from going down, even if he had formed the design to leap into the ocean in the first moment of a calm. Place him in the van of an army, it is by no means certain that he will not prove a coward; tell him the cholera is about to rage, and he will deluge himself with preventive remedies; send him to a house visited with yellow fever, and he will steep himself in vinegar and carry with him an atmosphere of camphor. It is only under the one form, which the mind in some insane excitement may have chosen, that he preserves the desire to leave the world.

It will not be difficult, then, to set a right value on the declaration of those who profess to regard death not with indifference merely, but with contempt. It is pure affectation, or the indulgence of a vulgar levity; and must excite either compassion or disgust, according as it is marked by the spirit of fiendish scoffing or of human vanity and self-deception. A French moralist tells us of a valet who danced merrily on the scaffold, where he was to be broken on the wheel. A New England woman, belonging to a family which esteemed itself one of the first, was convicted of aiding her paramour to kill her husband. She was a complete sensualist, one to whom life was everything, and the loss of it the total shipwreck of everything. On her way to the place of execution she was accompanied by a clergyman of no very great ability; and all along the road, with the gallows in plain sight, she amused herself in teasing the good man, whose wits were no match for her raillery. He had been buying a new chaise, quite an event in the life of a humble country pastor, and when he spoke of the next world she would amuse herself in praising his purchase. If he deplored her fate and her prospects, she would grieve at his exposure to the inclement weather, and laughed and chatted as if she had been driving to a wedding and not to her own funeral. And why was

this? Because death was not feared? No; but because death was feared, and feared intensely. The Eastern women, who are burned alive with their deceased husbands, often utter shrieks that would pierce the hearers to the soul; and, to prevent a compassion which would endanger the reign of superstition, the priests, with drums and cymbals, drown the terrific cries of their victims. So it is with those who go to the court of the King of Terrors with merriment on their lips. They dread his presence, and they seek to drown the noise of his approaching footsteps by the sound of their own ribaldry. If the scaffold often rings with a jest, it is because the mind shrinks from the solemnity of the impending change.

Perhaps the most common device for averting contemplation from death itself is, in directing it to the manner of dying. Vanitas vanitatum! Vanity does not give up its hold on the last hour. Men wish to die with distinction, to be buried in state; and the last thoughts are employed on the decorum of the moment, or in the anticipation of funeral splendors. It was no uncommon thing among the Romans for a rich man to appoint an heir on condition that his obsequies should be celebrated with costly pomp. "When I am dead,” said an Indian chief, who fell into his last sleep at Washington-“ when I am dead let the big guns be fired over me." The words were thought worthy of being engraved on his tomb; but they are no more than a plain expression of a very common passion; the same which leads the humblest to desire that at least a stone may be placed at the head of his grave, and demands the erection of splendid mausoleums and costly tombs for the mistaken

men

"Who by the proofs of death pretend to live."

Among the ancients, an opulent man, while yet in health would order his own sarcophagus; and nowadays the wealthy sometimes build their own tombs, for the sake of securing a satisfactory monument. A vain man, who had done this at a great expense, showed his motive so plainly that his neighbors laughed with the sexton of the parish, who wished that the builder might not be kept long out of the interest of his money.

But it is not merely in the decorations of the grave that vanity