no genius to bestow, but which can never become vulgar or contemptible, if bestowed with judgment; because no single age produces many men of merit superior to panegyric. None but the first names can stand unassisted against the attacks of time ; and if men, raised to reputation by accident or caprice, have nothing but their names engraved on their tombs, there is danger lest in a few years the inscription require an interpreter. Thus have their expectations been disappointed, who honoured Picus of Mirandola with this pompous epitaph :

Hic situs est PICUS MIRANDOLA, cætera nount
Et Tagus et Ganges, forsan et Antipodes,

His name, then celebrated in the remotest corners of the earth, is now almost forgotten; and his works, then studied, admired, and applauded, are now mouldering in obscurity....

Next in dignity to the bare name is a short character, simple and unadorned, without exaggeration, superlatives, or rhetoric. Such were the inscriptions in use among the Romans, in which the victories gained by their emperors were commemorated by a single epithet; as Cæsar Germanicus, Cæsar Dacicus, Germanicus, Illyricus. Such would be this epitaph, ISAACUS NEWTONUS, naturæ legibus investigatis, hic quiescit.

But, to far the greatest part of mankind, a longer encomium is necessary for the publication of their

virtues, and the preservation of their memories; and in the composition of these it is that art is principally required, and precepts therefore may be useful.

*In writing EPITAPHS, one circumstance is to be considered, which affects no other composition; the place in which they are now commonly found, restrains them to a particular air of solemnity, and debars them from the admission of all lighter or gayer ornaments. In this it is that the style of an EPITAPH necessarily differs from that of an ELEGY. The custom of burying our dead either in or near our churches, perhaps originally founded on a rational design of fitting the mind for religious exercises, by laying before it the most affecting proof of the uncertainty of life, makes it proper to exclude from our EPITAPHS all such allusions as are contrary to the doctrines, for the propagation of which the churches are erected, and to the end for which those who peruse the monuments must be supposed to come thither. Nothing is, therefore, more ridicu. lous than to copy the Roman inscriptions, which were engraven on stones by the high-way, and composed by those who generally reflected on mortality only to excite in themselves and others a quicker relish of pleasure, and a more luxurious enjoyment of life, and whose regard for the dead extended no farther than a wish that the earth might be light upon them.

All allusions to the heathen mythology are therefore absurd, and all regard for the senseless remains of a dead man impertinent and superstitious. One of the first distinctions of the primitive christians, was their neglect of bestowing garlands on the dead, in which they are very rationally defended by their apologist in Minutius Felix. "We lavish no flowers nor odours on the dead," says he, "because they have no sense of fragrance or of beauty." We profess to reverence the dead, not for their sake, but for our own. It is therefore always with indignation or contempt that I read the epitaph on Cowley, a man, whose learning and poetry were his lowest merits :

Aurea dum late volitant tua scripta per orbem,
Et fama eternum vivis, divine Poëtu,
Hic placida jaceas requie, custodiat urham
Cana Fides, vigilentque perenni lampade Musæ!
Sit sucer ille locus, nec quis temerarius ausit
Sacrilega turbare manu venerabile bustum.
Intacti maneant, maneant per sæcula dulces
COWLEII cineres, serventque immobile saxum,

To pray that the ashes of a friend may lie undis. turbed, and that the divinities that favoured him in his life, may watch for ever round him, to preserve his tomb from violation, and drive sacrilege away, is only rational in him who believes the soul interested in the repose of the body, and the powers

which he invokes for its protection able to preserve it. To censure such expressions as contrary to religion, or as remains of heathen superstition, would be too great a degree of severity. I condemn them only as uninstructive and unaffecting, as too ludicrous for reverence or grief, for christianity and a temple.

That the designs and decorations of monuments ought likewise to be formed with the same regard to the solemnity of the place, cannot be denied: it is an established principle, that all ornaments owe their beauty to their propriety. The same glitter of dress that adds graces to gaiety and youth, would make age and dignity contemptible. Charon with his boat is far from heightening the awful grandeur of the universal judgment, though drawn by Angelo himself; nor is it easy to imagine a greater absurdity than that of gracing the walls of a christian temple with the figure of Mars leading a hero to battle, or Cupids sporting round a virgin. The pope who defaced the statues of the deities at the tomb of Sannazarius is, in my opinion, more easily to be defended, than he that erected them.

It is, for the same reason, improper to address the EPITAPH to the passenger, a custom which an injudicious veneration for antiquity introduced again at the revival of letters, and which, among many others, Passeratius suffered to mislead him in his EPITAPH upon the heart of Henry, King of France, who was