An epigram by Palladas (Anthol. Graec. Palat., x. 78), translated by W. R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library), commences as follows: "Cast away complaint and be not troubled, for how brief is the time thou dwellest here. compared with all the life that follows this!"

One writer in Notes and Queries quotes the analogous English:

"Enjoy your life, my brother,
Is grey old Reason's song;
One has so little time to live,
And one is dead so long."

Another has heard of a similar inscription over a cottage in Scotland:

"Be happy whilst ye're leevin,

For ye're a lang time deid."

Two of J. F. Davidson's "Anacreontics" (in both of which death is referred to) begin respectively:

and,

"To the lute's voluptuous sound
Let the rosy bowl go round";

"Comrades, joyous be to-night ;
After death is no delight." 40

A curious "Anacreontic" song, quoted by Isaac
D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature (1791), was
written by William Oldys (1696-1761).
The song is

"on a fly drinking out of a cup of ale":

"Busy, curious, thirsty fly!

Drink with me, and drink as I!

Make the most of life you may;

Life is short and wears away!

Thine's a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore !

Threescore summers when they're gone,

Will appear as short as one."

It is also given by H. P. Dodd (Epigrammatists, London, 1870, pp. 353-354), who, in the same connexion, quotes 40 J. F. Davidson, The Anacreontea, London, 1915, pp. 194, 195.

the last stanza of Dr. Johnson's "Ode on Winter," with its carpe diem sentiment (suitable for a sun-dial inscription) expressed in a way that can offend none :

"Catch then, O! catch the transient hour,
Improve each moment as it flies;

Life's a short summer-man a flower:

He dies-alas! how soon he dies!"

The following (after Kastner) is from an old French. vaudeville:

"Buvons, chers amis, buvons ;

Le temps qui fuit nous y convie.
Profitons de la vie

A decastich by the French poet, Clément Marot (died 1544), in which a famishing man tells of a man who died in a state of drunkenness, ends :

"Las

dit-il, j'ai, moi langoureux,

Faim sans fin, l'autre eut fin sans faim.”

Some of the so-called "Moralische Pfenninge" of the town of Basel, which I shall further on describe, represent roses and Death's-heads, with the inscription, "Heut

"In regard to drinking there are, of course, innumerable eulogistic inscriptions to be found on old bottles, jugs and drinking-vessels. I have seen the following painted on an old leather "black-jack" for beer, and I think that other versions of the inscription occur:

"I wish in Heaven

his soul may dwell Who first devis'd

the leather Bottel."

In whimsical extravagance this is quite surpassed by the inscription on a treasured rock-crystal wine-cup which belonged to "the good" King René d'Anjou (1409–1480) :

"Qui bien beurra

Dieu voira.

Qui beurra tout d'une baleine
Voira Dieu et la Madeleine."

rodt, Morgen dodt" ("To-day red, to-morrow dead"), or "Heut send (sind) wier rot und Morgen todt" ("To-day we are red and to-morrow dead ").

Human life has been very often compared, from early times in the world's history, to a rose or other flowers, but the comparison sounds rather curious in the epitaph on a monument for Richard Humble, Alderman of London, and his two wives, erected (1616) in Southwark Cathedral (St. Saviour's), formerly St. Mary Overies Priory Church. The epitaph, which seems to be derived from a poem, attributed to Francis Quarles, though he lived 1592-1644, commences:

"Like to the damaske rose you see,

Or like the blossom on the tree . .

Lord Neaves gives the following translation of an anonymous epigram in the Greek Anthology (Anth. Graec. Palat., xi. 53) :

"Short is the rose's bloom; another morn

Will show no rose, but in its stead a thorn."

In regard to the comparison of youth, life, and beauty with roses and the short-lived flowers one may refer to the epigrams of Rufinus, Strato, &c., in the Greek Anthology, as quoted by H. P. Dodd, in his Epigrammatists, 1870, pp. 52, 53. Dodd likewise refers, in the same connexion, to Pope's Epistle to Martha Blount, and to the passage in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book ii., Canto 12, 74. Cf. also further on (footnote in Part I. E.), poetical comparisons of female beauty with

a rose.

B.

Orthodox Religious Teaching of Mediaeval Europe.
The Morality Tales and Morality Plays.

The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead.
The "Vado Mori" Poems.

The Dance of Death (Danse Macabre).
The "Ars Moriendi" Designs.

It was in Mediaeval Europe, under the auspices of the Catholic Church, that descriptions and representations of the terrors of death and hell began to take on their most horrible aspects.

42

Isaac D'Israeli (Curiosities of Literature) writes: "When the Christian religion spread over Europe, the world changed: the certainty of a future state of existence, by the artifices of wicked worldly men, terrified instead of consoling human nature; and in the resurrection the ignorant multitude seemed rather to have dreaded retribution, than to have hoped for remuneration. .. The horrors with which Christianity was afterwards disguised arose in the corruptions of Christianity among those insane ascetics, who.. imagined that to secure an existence in the other world,

42 In this connexion it may be remarked that whilst some of the so-called "parting scenes on Greek sepulchral marble reliefs are sorrowful in a simple and beautiful way of their own, the mural paintings in Etruscan tombs invest the idea of death (and the parting scenes represented) with horrors equal to those conjured up by Mediaeval superstition and Mediaeval art. The brutal-looking Etruscan "Charun” with his hammer, and occasionally other malignant-looking demons, like Gorgons or Furies (though usually represented as males), sometimes holding snakes in their hands, play an important part in Etruscan death The Etruscan representations of infernal deities remind one of some of the figures and emblems of the Hindoo deity Siva or Shiva and his terrible wife Kali, with their serpents, skulls, &c.

scenes.