"It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday or a maid-servant to-day; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools; and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die."

"I have read of a fair young German gentleman who, while living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way that, after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half-eaten, and his midriff and back-bone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors.”*

"It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of fiveand-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke the stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? What friends to visit us? What officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funerals ?"+

"A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more: and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal

* [Works, iv. 342,

† [Ibid. pp. 342-3.]

seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less.* To my apprehension, it is a sad record which is left by Athenæus concerning Ninus, the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words: "Ninus the Assyrian had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire among the Magi; nor touched his God with the sacred rod according to the laws: he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the deity, nor administered justice, nor spake to his people; nor numbered them: but he was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his

*The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey, by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor's style was to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it:

"Mortality, behold, and fear,

What a charge of flesh is here!
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones:

Here they lie had realms and lands,

Who now want strength to stir their hands.
Where from their pulpits, soil'd with dust,

They preach In greatness is no trust.'

Here's an acre sown indeed

With the richest, royal'st seed
That the earth did e'er suck in,

Since the first man died for sin.

Here the bones of birth have cried,

Though gods they were, as men they died.'

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.

Here's a world of pomp and state

Buried in dust, once dead by fate."

[Dyce's Beaumont and Fletcher, xi. 497.]

wines, he threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulchre, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometimes I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust, that was and is all my portion. The wealth with which I was esteemed blessed, my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw goat. I am gone to hell and when I went thither, I neither carried gold, nor horse, nor silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust.”*

He who wrote in this manner also wore a mitre, and is now a heap of dust;† but when the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery, and virtue an empty shade!

*

[Taylor's Works, iv. pp. 343–4.]

† He died in August, 1667, Bishop of Down and Connor.-ED,

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE SPIRIT OF ANCIENT AND MODERN

LITERATURE

ON THE GERMAN DRAMA, CONTRASTED WITH THAT OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH.

BEFORE I proceed to the more immediate subject of the present Lecture, I wish to say a few words of one or two writers in our own time, who have imbibed the spirit and imitated the language of our elder dramatists. Among these I may reckon the ingenious author of the Apostate and Evadne, who in the last-mentioned play, in particular, has availed himself with much judgment and spirit of the tragedy of the Traitor † by old Shirley. It would be curious to hear the opinion of a professed admirer of the Ancients, and captious deposer of the Moderns, with respect to this production, before he knew it was a copy of an old play. Shirley himself lived in the time of Charles I., and died in the beginning of Charles II.; but he had formed his style on that of the preceding age, and had written the greatest number

* T. Sheil. Evadne was performed at Covent Garden, Feb. 10, 1819; Geneste (Acc. of the English Stage, viii. 700) states that the plot was largely taken from the Traitor, a drama by Shirley, of which an alteration was afterwards made by T. Rivers, a Jesuit, See Dyce's Memoir of Shirley (Works, 1833, i. xv.).—ED.

† By the same author, was brought out at the same house, May 3, 1817. See Geneste (Ibid. p. 611), who does not give a very favourable account of either performance.-ED.

He and his wife both died from fright, occasioned by the great fire of London in 1665 [1666], and lie buried in St. Giles's churchyard, [But they survived till October, 1666, at all events. See Shirley's Works, 1833, i. lvii.-ix.]

of his plays in conjunction with Jonson, Decker, and Massinger. He was "the last of those fair clouds that on the bosom of bright honour sailed in long procession, calm and beautiful." The name of Mr. Tobin is fami

liar to every lover of the drama. His Honeymoon is evidently founded on The Taming of a Shrew, and Duke Aranza has been pronounced by a polite critic to be “ an elegant Petruchio." The plot is taken from Shakspeare; but the language and sentiments, both of this play and of The Curfew, bear a more direct resemblance to the flowery tenderness of Beaumont and Fletcher, who were, I believe, the favourite study of our author. Mr. Lamb's John Woodvil may be considered as a dramatio fragment, intended for the closet rather than the stage. It would sound oddly in the lobbies of either theatre, amidst the noise and glare and bustle of resort; but "there where we have treasured up our hearts," in silence and in solitude, it may claim and find a place for itself. It might be read with advantage in the still retreats of Sherwood Forest, where it would throw a newborn light on the green sunny glades; the tenderest flower might seem to drink of the poet's spirit, and “the tall deer, that paints a dancing shadow of his horns in the swift brook," might seem to do so in mockery of the poet's thought. Mr. Lamb, with a modesty often attendant on fine feeling, has loitered too long in the humbler avenues leading to the temple of ancient genius, instead of marching boldly up to the sanctuary, as many with half his pretensions would have done: "but fools rush in, where angels fear to tread." The defective or objectionable parts of this production are mitations of the defects of the old writers: its beauties are his own, though in their manner. The touches of thought and passion are often as pure and delicate as they are profound; and the character of his heroine Margaret is perhaps the finest and most genuine female