fifth one whole will be what will be called my death, but what will be really my life,

ness of life.

MARHAM.

my new

Four bodies, one after another, you have had, and I ten or more. It is quite true, I suppose. And it is knowledge along with which embalming would not have become a practice, nor such tombs have been built as are in Lycia.

AUBIN.

In a mausoleum or a grand tomb, so much is made of the body that one thinks of it too much, as though it had been the whole man. For my own body I would not have a leaden coffin, nor a tomb, nor a bricked grave; but I would have it laid in the mould. For now it is hot and cold with the air, and well and ill with the weather, and the way the wind blows; and so the way of nature let it go when I am gone, - ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

MARHAM.

But, my dear Oliver

AUBIN.

This frame of mine, it is mine

through eating, and drinking, and breathing. This body of mine is out of wheat-fields and gardens; it has come to me out of the ground, through the roots of herbs and trees, and in wholesome air from the forests of Norway, and the woody mid

dle of Australia, and the banian-trees of Asia. There is in my veins what has been in a rainbow, perhaps, and very certainly what is from the ricefields of the East Indies, and from the cane-brakes of the West Indies, and from out of the sea. Wonderful is the way our souls take flesh, and have their earthly being. It is well known to us, and so is not much to think of; else even life after death would be an easier thought than it is sometimes.

MARHAM.

We men may well hope to live again; as we, and we alone, are let know what wonderful way we are living already.

AUBIN.

It is better not to think so much of the bodies of the dead as the Egyptians did in embalming them, and as the Arabians did in making rock tombs for them, and as the Romans and other nations did in their various funereal customs. I would not wish to have my body laid under the floor of a church; but in the earth let it be laid, and let the grass grow over it, and under that green mantle of her spreading, let Nature be free to take again into herself what has been my body; into grass let it go, and up the roots, and into the green boughs of trees; and in vapor let it rise from the ground, and into the clouds.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

O, though oft depressed and lonely,

All my fears are laid aside,

If I but remember only

Such as these have lived and died!

LONGFELLOW.

AUBIN.

I WOULD not allow of any creed in the Church but the Bible; and it should be heresy for one minister to use a word of it against another, except lovingly. O, but there would then be the peace of God among Christians, and very soon, perhaps, throughout the world!

MARHAM.

In Eton church, under the arms of Sir Henry Wotton, it is said, in Latin, that underneath lies the author of the maxim, that a great flow of argument is what runs to a disease in the Church. And then the reader is told to ask for his name elsewhere.

AUBIN.

His epitaph is not in such good taste as Walton's life of him. How few good epitaphs there are! I have seen somewhere, that on the tomb of one Count Algarotti, a philosopher at Pisa, is what he himself ordered should be cut, Here

lies Algarotti, but not all of him. A word or two more would have made it religious, and the best epitaph I know of. Of all the monumental inscriptions in Ely cathedral, there is not one that is good, I think; but I did not read the more modern ones.

MARHAM.

You must have been very fastidious when you were there, Oliver; for some good ones you must have seen, because so many dignitaries of the Church have always lived at Ely, men of learning, and leisure, and often, no doubt, of poetical, as well as devout feeling. And then, if I remember rightly, the tablets in the cathedral, and the inscriptions on tombs, are very numerous.

AUBIN.

So they are; telling what stalls, rectories, deaneries, wives, children, learning, virtues, and years, the clergy of that rich soil have had; and what have been the lives of several officers of the Right Honorable the Corporation of the Great Level of the Fens.

MARHAM.

Such persons are gratefully remembered in those marshes, I dare say.

AUBIN.

So it would seem; for an epitaph says that one deceased was very dearly remembered in Thorny Level, in the Isle of Ely, and in Deep

ing Fens, in Lincolnshire, on account of his ability in draining fenny and marsh lands. Another inscription says, "Under this marble rests what there was of earth in Thomas Benyon, a clergyman. Us survivors he taught how to die, on the twenty-fifth of February, in the year of our salvation sixteen hundred and eighty-nine." Now that is well, but it is followed by another line or two, not quite so good. I wonder why it is that funeral inscriptions are almost always so poorly written, so universally wanting in taste.

MARHAM.

It is nothing surprising, Oliver. For such inscriptions are commonly written by men blind with tears, and with unsteady hands. And there is a distress that is not rare, and that quite disables the mind for correct thinking, and especially for tasteful expression; for taste comes of mental harmony; and so there is no wonder it is wanting on tombstones, which are written on in a troubled spirit almost always.

AUBIN.

Uncle, you are right. And I am rather ashamed of myself for what gravestones I have smiled at; for I was thoughtless; as I ought to have known that epitaphs are the utterances of mourners, and are nearly all of them what would sound very natural, if heard from quivering lips, and with a stop here and there to keep a sob