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; 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, 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, Unhallow'd is his grave: His funeral dirge the breezes sigh, 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 crater of Mount Etna, and whose brazen sandal, ejected in some subsequent explosion, proved a more durable record of his fate than any tablets could have supplied. Still fewer could imitate the physician who, in his zeal for the improvement of anatomy, bequeathed his body to Surgeons' Hall for dissection. This is indeed the perfection of self-oblivion-the triumph of philanthropy. Demonax, the ancient Cretan philosopher, was equally unsolicitous about his remains, of which he wished the birds and animals to be participators. "Is it a crime," he exclaimed, "that having endeavoured to benefit mankind in my life, my body should do the same to beasts after my death ?" What sepulchre so sublime as the mighty ocean, with its unimagined wonders and sumless treasures, its ever-rolling billows above, and its boundless floors below, tesselated with spars and shells, crystal and seaweed? There, whole cities are submerged, with their churches, through whose portals the porpus flounders, and their palaces, amid whose marble halls the dolphin may recognise his own sculptured image. In that heaped-up repository is all the wealth for which men live and die. Argosies, with their golden freightage spangling the level sand-statues upon which the patient Grecian exhausted his divine art, armour and diamonds, spices and rich robes, gums and perfumes; ancient galleys, and modern men-ofwar.-Beneath those waters lie stretched out in peaceful contact the skeletons of those who met upon their surface in fierce encounter; the bullets of every nation are scattered around their victims in indistinguishable profusion; while the tenants of the deep float heedlessly athwart these precious relics of an unknown world. Bards, with whose melodious strains we are still enchanted, have found a grave in the unfathomed deep; -Orpheus, whom the mad Bacchanals sent "down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore;" he who sang "The Shipwreck," and perished in some unknown wilderness of the waters; Lycidas, whom Milton would not allow to welter to the parching wind, "without the meed of some melodious tear;" and other less illustrious sons of song. Peace to your manes; ye who have passed away before us into the invisible world! Whether ye repose in the bosom of the great mother, or are whelmed beneath the caverns of "the bounding Neptune," we bid ye each farewell, in the words of the ancient Romans to their deceased friends-" Vale! vale! vale! nos te ordine quo Natura permiserit, sequemur." THE WISDOM OF LAUGHTER. "Let those now laugh who never laugh'd before, THEY have really brought puppetshows to an incredible perfection. I have just been gazing upon one which infinitely transcends all the fantoccini, pantomimes, or dramas, I ever beheld; the figures appear |