"And gentle Nature grieved,'" &c. (page 837). "And suffering Nature grieved that one should die." SOUTHEY'S Retrospect.-W.

"And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?" (page 837),

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

ESSAY UPON EPITAPHS.

Ir need 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 east 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 euro; 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 pre-conceive 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 em junction of these account for the desire? Do less it is a necessary consequence of this cur junction; yet not I think as a direct result only to be come at through an internet thought, viz. that of an intimation or assuris within us, that some part of our nature is 2 perishable. At least the precedence, in order birth, of one feeling to the other, is unqueste able. If we look back upon the days of dai hood, we shall find that the time is not in wa brance when, with respect to our own individa Being, the mind was without this assuraLa whereas, the wish to be remembered by friends or kindred after death, or even in alsæt is, as we shall discover, a sensation that doe form itself till the social feelings have bec developed, and the Reason has connected t with a wide range of objects. Forlorn, and k off from communication with the best part of b nature, must that man be, who should derive te child, from the same unthinking gaiety of sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind liness of animal spirits with which the lasmi iz the meadow, or any other irrational crestar is endowed; who should ascribe it, in short, iblank ignorance in the child; to an in arising from the imperfect state of his faculis to come, in any point of his being, into copia" with a notion of death; or to an unrefect acquiescence in what had been instilled into blo Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of though he may have forgotten his former ever noticed the early, obstinate, and una sess able inquisitiveness of children upon the s of origination? This single fact proves ed

wardly the monstrousness of those suppostes

for, if we had no direct external testimony the minds of very young children meditate fes ingly upon death and immortality, these enqui which we all know they are perpetually mat concerning the whence, do necessarily indi correspondent habits of interrogation con the whither. Origin and tendency are notEN inseparably co-relative. Never did a child sa by the side of a running stream, pondering i in himself what power was the feeder of perpetual current, from what never wears * sources the body of water was supplied, but must have been inevitably propelled to file this question by another: "Towards what a is it in progress? what receptacle can co the mighty influx?" And the spirit of answer must have been, though the word c be sea or ocean, accompanied perhaps image gathered from a map, or from the object in nature-these might have bee letter, but the spirit of the answer must s been as inevitably,-a receptacle without bo or dimensions ;-nothing less than infinity. may, then, be justified in asserting, that the s of immortality, if not a co-existent and birth with Reason, is among the earliest offspring: and we may further assert, that these conjoined, and under their counters"the human affections are gradually formed opened out. This is not the place to enter the recesses of these investigations; b 2 subject requires me here to make a plain a that, for my own part, it is to me inconcatsthat the sympathies of love towards each c which grow with our growth, could ever a

y new strength, or even preserve the old, after had received from the outward senses the pression of death, and were in the habit of ing that impression daily renewed and its companying feeling brought home to ourselves, 1 to those we love; if the same were not interacted by those communications with our ernal Being, which are anterior to all these periences, and with which revelation coincides, has through that coincidence alone (for erwise it could not possess it) a power to affect I confess, with me the conviction is absolute, t, if the impression and sense of death were thus counterbalanced, such a hollowness uld pervade the whole system of things, such a nt of correspondence and consistency, a disprotion so astounding betwixt means and ends, at there could be no repose, no joy. Were we grow up unfostered by this genial warmth, a st would chill the spirit, so penetrating and wwerful, that there could be no motions of the of love; and infinitely less could we have y wish to be remembered after we had passed ay from a world in which each man had moved out like a shadow.-If, then, in a creature lowed with the faculties of foresight and son, the social affections could not have unled themselves uncountenanced by the faith t Man is an immortal being; and if, conseently, neither could the individual dying have I a desire to survive in the remembrance of his ows, nor on their side could they have felt a h to preserve for future times vestiges of the arted; it follows, as a final inference, that hout the belief in immortality, wherein these eral desires originate, neither monuments nor taphs, in affectionate or laudatory commemora1 of the deceased, could have existed in the Ad. imonides, it is related, upon landing in a inge country, found the corse of an unknown son lying by the sea-side; he buried it, and honoured throughout Greece for the piety of t act. Another ancient Philosopher, clancing ix his eyes upon a dead body, regarded the e with slight, if not with contempt; saying, e the shell of the flown bird!" But it is not e supposed that the moral and tender-hearted onides was incapable of the lofty movements hought, to which that other Sage gave way at moment while his soul was intent only upon indestructible being; nor, on the other hand, the, in whose sight a lifeless human body was 10 more value than the worthless shell from ch the living fowl had departed, would not, different mood of mind, have been affected hose earthly considerations which had incited philosophic Poet to the performance of that is duty. And with regard to this latter we be assured that, if he had been destitute of capability of communing with the more ted thoughts that appertain to human are, he would have cared no more for the e of the stranger than for the dead body of a or porpoise which might have been cast up he waves. We respect the corporeal frame Ian, not merely because it is the habitation rational, but of an immortal Soul. Each of e Sages was in sympathy with the best ngs of our nature; feelings which, though seem opposite to each other, have another 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 manuer, 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 way-sides.

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 ruininate upon the beauty which the monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the surrounding images of nature-from 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 impressions, lively and afecting analogies of life as a journey-death as a sleep overcoming the tired wayfarer-of misfortune as a storm that falls suddenly upon himof beauty as a flower that passeth away, or of innocent pleasure as one that may be gatheredof 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 pinc-tree Hh

by the stroke of lightning upon the mountaintop 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 monuinents 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 sanctifled by the grove of cypress in which it is embosomed. Thoughts in the same temper as these have already been expressed with true sensibility by an ingenious 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 burialground, 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 stayed.

-wandered forth, where the cold dew of heaven
Lay on the humbler graves around, what time
The pale moon gazed upon the turiy 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 sympathised,
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 o'er 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 t mode practised by the Ancients, with oe | peculiar to itself. The sensations of pious de fulness, which attend the celebration of th sabbath-day in rural places, are profitably che tised by the sight of the graves of kindred friends, gathered together in that general bat towards which the thoughtful yet happy se tors themselves are journeying. Hence a purs church, in the stillness of the country ka visible centre of a community of the living the dead; a point to which are habitually reļ ferred the nearest concerns of both.

As, then, both in cities and in villages, the de are deposited in close connection with our place | of worship, with us the composition of an ep naturally turns, still more than among the te tions of antiquity, upon the most serious a solemn affections of the human mind; departed worth-upon personal or social sara and admiration-upon religion, individual social-upon time, and upon eternity, Acce ingly, it suffices in ordinary cases, to securi composition of this kind from censure, contain nothing that shall shock or be it sistent with this spirit. But, to entitle an to praise, more than this is necessary. It to contain some thought or feeling belong the mortal or immortal part of our natury te ingly expressed; and if that be done, b general or even trite the sentiment every man of pure mind will read the words pleasure and gratitude. A husband be wife; a parent breathes a sigh of disapp hope over a lost child; a son utters a sentin of filial reverence for a departed father or a friend perhaps inscribes an encomium revers the companionable qualities, or the solid of the tenant of the grave, whose depar left a sadness upon his memory. This a pious admonition to the living, and a expression of Christian confidence in im is the language of a thousand churchyar it does not often happen that anything greater degree discriminate or approgra the dead or to the living, is to be found in 20 This want of discrimination has been as Dr. Johnson, in his Essay upon the epila Pope, to two causes; first, the scantiness objects of human praise; and, secondly, the of variety in the characters of men; ot, his own words, "to the fact, that the grea of mankind have no character at all language may be holden without blame t the generalities of common conversatio does not become a critic and a moralist spe seriously upon a serious subject. The admiration in human nature are not st abundant: and every man has a character own, to the eye that has skill to perceive real cause of the acknowledged want th crimination in sepulchral memorials That to analyse the characters of others cially of those whom we love, is not a c natural employment of men at any t are not anxious unerringly to understa constitution of the minds of those wh1 soothed, who have cheered, who have s us: with whom we have been long 320 pleased or delighted. The affections ar own justification. The light of love in our

th

is a satisfactory evidence that there is a body of worth 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 pure intellect; nor do we find much temptation to detect the shades by which a good quality or virtue is discriminated in them from an excellence known by the same general name as it exists in the mind of another; and, least of all, do we incline to these refinements when under the pressure of sorrow, admiration, or regret, or when actuated by any of those feelings which incite men to prolong the memory of their friends and kindred, by records placed n the bosom of the all-uniting and equalising receptacle of the dead.

The first requisite, then, in an Epitaph is, that t should speak, in a tone which shall sink into he heart, the general language of humanity as connected with the subject of death-the source rom which an epitaph proceeds of death, and of life. To be born and to die are the two points n which all men feel themselves to be in absolute oincidence. This general language may be utered so strikingly as to entitle an epitaph to high raise; yet it cannot lay claim to the highest inless other excellencies be superadded. Passing hrough all intermediate steps, we will attempt o determine at once what these excellencies are, nd wherein consists the perfection of this species of composition.-It will be found to lie in a due roportion of the common or universal feeling of humanity to sensations excited by a distinct and clear conception, conveyed to the reader's aind, of the individual, whose death is deplored nd whose memory is to be preserved; at least of is character as, after death, it appeared to those ho loved him and lament his loss. The geneal sympathy ought to be quickened, provoked, nd diversified, by particular thoughts, actions, mages,-circumstances of age, occupation, maner of life, prosperity which the deceased had nown, or adversity to which he had been subject; nd these ought to be bound together and solemised into one harmony by the general sympathy, he two powers should temper, restrain, and xalt each other. The reader ought to know who nd what the man was whom he is called upon think of with interest. A distinct conception hould be given (implicitly where it can, rather han explicitly) of the individual lamented.-But he writer of an epitaph is not an anatomist, ho dissects the internal frame of the mind; he not even a painter, who executes a portrait at eisure and in entire tranquillity: his delineation, e must remember, is performed by the side of e grave; and, what is more, the grave of one hom he loves and admires. What purity and rightness is that virtue clothed in, the image of hich must no longer bless our living eyes! The haracter of a deceased friend or beloved kinsman not seen, no-nor ought to be seen, otherwise an as a tree through a tender haze or a lumious mist, that spiritualises and beautifies it; at takes away, indeed, but only to the end that e parts which are not abstracted may appear ore dignified and lovely; may impress and affect e more. Shall we say, then, that this is not uth, not a faithful image; and that, accordingly, he purposes of commemoration cannot be anvered?-It is truth, and of the highest order;

for, though doubtless things are not apparent which did exist; yet, the object being looked at through this medium, parts and proportions are brought into distinct view which before had been only imperfectly or unconsciously seen: it is truth hallowed by love-the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living! This may easily be brought to the test. Let one, whose eyes have been sharpened by personal hostility to discover what was amiss in the character of a good man, hear the tidings of his death, and what a change is wrought in a moment! Enmity melts away; and, as it disappears, unsightliness, disproportion, and deformity, vanish; and, through the influence of commiseration, a harmony of love and beauty succeeds. Bring such a man to the tombstone on which shall be inscribed an epitaph on his adversary, composed in the spirit which we have recommended. Would he turn from it as from an idle tale? No;-the thoughtful look, the sigh, and perhaps the involuntary tear, would testify that it had a sane, a generous, and good meaning; and that on the writer's mind had remained an impression which was a true abstract of the character of the deceased; that his gifts and graces were remembered in the simplicity in which they ought to be remembered. The composition and quality of the mind of a virtuous man, contemplated by the side of the grave where his body is mouldering, ought to appear, and be felt as something midway between what he was on earth walking about with his living frailties, and what he may be presumed to be as a Spirit in heaven. It suffices, therefore, that the trunk and the main branches of the worth of the deceased be boldly and unaffectedly represented. Any further detail, minutely and scrupulously pursued, especially if this be done with laborious and antithetic discriminations, must inevitably frustrate its own purpose; forcing the passing Spectator to this conclusion,-either that the dead did not possess the merits ascribed to him, or that they who have raised a monument to his memory, and must therefore be supposed to have been closely connected with him, were incapable of perceiving those merits; or at least during the act of composition had lost sight of them; for, the understanding having been so busy in its petty occupation, how could the heart of the mourner be other than cold? and in either of these cases, whether the fault be on the part of the buried person or the survivors, the memorial is unaffecting and profitless.

Much better is it to fall short in discrimination than to pursue it too far, or to labour it unfeelingly. For in no place are we so much disposed to dwell upon those points, of nature and condition, wherein all men resemble each other, as in the temple where the universal Father is worshipped, or by the side of the grave which gathers all human Beings to itself, and "equalises the lofty and the low." We suffer and we weep with the same heart; we love and are anxious for one another in one spirit; our hopes look to the same quarter; and the virtues by which we are all to be furthered and supported, as patience, meekness, good-will, justice, temperance, and temperate desires, are in an equal degree the concern of us all. Let an Epitaph, then, contain at least these acknowledgments to our common nature; nor let the sense of their