With pious sacrilege, a grave I stole : With impious piety that grave I wrong'd." Young. Lucretius has remarked the indecorous haste of the funerals, and the absence of the usual pageants, in a forcible line. "Incomitata rapi certabant funera vasta." Ovid has expanded the idea of Thucydides. "None o'er their urns with decent honors grieve, With rude dispute their neighbour's pile they claim, None now the pious mourners' place supply, And sons and fathers unlamented die; The ghosts of young and old all stray in air, And meet their wand'ring kindred shadows there : Ovid. Met. vii. In modern times comparatively little importance is attached to the pageantry and pomp of interment, the feelings with which we regard death are only those natural to beings who must all die,--the dead body of an indifferent person is indeed turned away from, in some measure, with disgust, for when life, the embalmer, is gone, what is it but corruption? Towards the body of a friend much of personal regard is continued, and now that it is helpless and unable to execute its own wishes, we take upon ourselves that tender care of it which its owner himself would have extended over it. There is, indeed, thought and care about a grave, but we extend the notions of life to the repose of death. That which fills the mind, while living, with images of quiet, stillness, retirement, nay, even comfort, is chosen as a suitable and desirable place for our last abode. We associate ideas of melancholy with a foreign burial, and even in death we love to assemble in a family circle. The pains of death have been half removed by an assurance of mouldering among kindred dust. Pope has touched this string in his "Elegy on the Death of an unfortunate Lady.' "By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd, By strangers honour'd, and by strangers mourn'd!" And in Mickle's translation of Camoëns there is an affecting passage which hangs on these life-in-death feelings: 66 each dreary mournful hour we gave Some brave companion to a foreign grave: But In the great plague of Marseilles we find, at one time, the whole city in a state of rebellion against the magistrates for a grave. The clergy, out of a regard for the living, would not permit the vaults of the churches to be used for this purpose. when the streets became impassable from the heaps of dead bodies, and the labourers employed in clearing them away sunk down as dead as their burdens, the city was in an uproar, broke open the churches, tore up the vaults, and filled them with their dead. “Omnia, denique, sancta deûm delubra replerat Lucretius. During the plague of Athens there was a more than ordinary reason for this violation of the temples. The city was, at the same moment, besieged by an enemy without, while it was destroyed by this scourge within. All the inhabitants of the country had fled to the city for refuge, and it was thus pent up in a crowded town, dwelling together in stifling booths, built for the occasion in the squares, and the open places about the * "At length the temples of the gods themselves Mason Good. temples, and even in them, the disease commenced his attack upon the poor beleaguered population. In modern times, as has been mentioned, the accumulation of dead bodies in the streets has been so great as to render them impassable, and absolutely to cause the removal of the remaining inhabitants to less incumbered districts. What must it have been then in Athens, crammed with inhabitants as it was at this unfortunate moment? In the ancient cities there was another great cause of filling the highways with the dead and dying,—the fountains and conduits, which always adorned them, attracted multitudes of poor wretches who were raving under the tortures of thirst,and here they tumbled one over another until death, not the water, relieved their pains "And now each sex, regardless of their shame, Press to the brooks and streams to quench their flame : Ovid. Met. vii. Wandering and restlessness is another characteristic of this calamity, which tended to crowd the streets with corpses. Neglected sufferers, who were the million, when delirium supervened, would struggle into the streets to die. This, too, Ovid has noticed. "Here from his bed one wretch uneasy flies, Others their languid arms to heav'n up cast, Surpris'd by death, they pray, and breathe their last." Ovid. Met. vii. The Bishop of Rochester has most strangely fretted and interlaced the sober and solemn account of Thucydides, in his Pindaric on the Plague of Athens, with his own fancies. In the manner of Cowley he has filled his descriptions with the most outrageous conceits and the wildest similes. To give a specimen, he says that the disease first shewed itself in the head and eyes, and he thus expresses the fact : "Upon the head first the disease, The redness of that sky Foretold a tempest nigh." * Creech, in his translation of Lucretius, seems to have had his eye as much upon the right reverend poet, as upon his author. It is curious to observe how this translator thought the classic was to be improved, either by hints from the Bishop of Rochester, or original touches of his own. We have collected a few lines from his translation, for which our readers will instantly see he was not in the least indebted to Lucretius. The lines in brackets are genuine Creech. Lucretius, B. vi. 1099. ["The wind, that bore the fate, went slowly on, 1106. The glowing eyes, with blood-shot beams, look'd red, 1137. [In vain they drank, for when the water came 1204. When one poor wretch was fall'n, to others fled: Seiz'd him, for fear of a discovery.] 1225. The shepherd, midst his flocks, resign'd his breath, Sometimes, however, the bishop approaches within sight of success, and does not, as usual, bid all nature and true feeling defiance. We may, perhaps, instance this passage on the want of sleep, under which the sufferers severely laboured. "No sleep, no peace, no rest, Their wand'ring and affrighted minds possess'd; Hell and eternal horror lies, Dark pictures and resemblances Of things to come, and of the world below, Sometimes they curse, sometimes they pray unto Sometimes they cruelties and fury breathe Not sleep, but waking now was sister unto death." But there is little enough of poetry here.-In the following there is a fine instance of the suddenness of the plaguedeath well expressed. "The father, at his death, Speaks his son heir with an infectious breath, In the same hour the son doth take His father's will, and his own make." There is another English plague-poet of a more original and even more peculiar cast. Wither had the advantage (some will think the disadvantage) of being an eye-witness, like Thucydides, of the depopulation of a vast city by this arch-destroyer. In speaking of the Britain's Remembrancer, we confess we must violate the precept on its title page, READ ALL OR CENSURE NOT. For verily it is one of the most unreadable books that ever came even under our eyes, retrospective and well-tried as they are. It is, as the title page imports, "a narrative of the plague lately past, a declaration of the mischiefs present, and a prediction of judgments to come," all huddled together in some six or seven hundred closely printed fanatical pages. We have, however, gone through it after a manner, taking warning (not as he would have had us) when he began to preach, and by dint of skipping and dipping, have hived all the matter of fact, and instinctively lighted upon the stray flowers of poetry, for such it contains, as was indeed likely, for Wither was a true poet, as some passages in another part of this number will prove. Wither had a strange wayward head, and it always seems an even chance whether his verse will turn out a satire |