If any of them (reader) were
Known unto thee, shed a tear;
Or if thyself possess a gem,
As dear to thee as this to them:
Though a stranger to this place,
Bewail in theirs, thine own hard case;
For thou, perhaps, at thy return,

May'st find thy darling in an urn.

The elegy has the high merit of simplicity, and is not wanting in pathos; but I cannot agree that it is Carew's master-piece. Among his elegiac compositions, the Elegy on Lady Hay has some lines of a higher order of merit, though it is very inferior as a whole piece :

I heard the virgin's sigh; I saw the sleek
And polished courtier channel his fresh cheek
With real tears; the new betrothed maid
Smiled not that day; the graver senate laid
Their business by; of all the courtly throng

Grief sealed the heart, and silence bound the tongue.

In the only epitaph by Pope on a young person, he has borrowed a point (for his epitaphs are mostly epigrammatic) from a monumental inscription to be found in Montfaucon's Antiquities:

Lucia Julia Prisca

Vixit annos xxvi.

Nihil unquam peccavit,

Nisi quod mortua est.

In the epitaph upon young Mr. Harcourt (in which he introduces his own name, Pope,) he writes

Who ne'er knew joy, but friendship might divide,

Or gave his father grief, but when he died.

Milton, in an epitaph on a young person, who died of a cold, has a conceit, that Winter wanting to kiss him, killed him with

his cold lips-Dryden, on a similar occasion, is scarcely more felicitous :

But knowing Heaven his home, to shun delay,

He leap'd o'er age, and took the shortest way.

Ben Jonson wrote epitaphs upon two of his own children; they are natural and simple, with little claim to poetical merit. Sir J. Beaumont, the author of Bosworth Field, wrote an epitaph upon his own son who died at the age of seven; it has no particular merit. There is something affecting in one of Jonson's epitaphs, when viewed in connection with the maladies and misfortunes of his own old age.

O, could I lose all, father, now! for why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age.

Besides epitaphs on young persons, many beautiful passages on the subject of their premature deaths are to be found in ancient and modern literature. In scripture we read of Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not." A very picturesque account is given, in Samuel, of King David sitting between the gates, and sending a watchman to the roof of the wall to look for messengers from the army. The king's first question was, "Is the young man Absalom safe?" The first messenger cannot tell; he is ordered to stand aside. Upon the king putting the same question to the second messenger, he is answered- "The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is"on which," Samuel relates, 'the king was much moved,

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and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, thus he said, O my son, Absalom, my son, my son

Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my

son, my son!

The most memorable of the passages in the classical authors upon the death of a young person, is that in the Ænead concerning Marcellus. That young man was heir to Augustus, being the son of his sister Octavia. On Virgil reading the verses to Octavia and Augustus, the mother swooned away; and the poet was rewarded with 10,000 sesterces for each line. The letters of Cicero to Atticus on the subject of erecting a temple to the memory of his daughter Tullia are very curious. He intended to have purchased grounds on the side of the Tiber for the site of the temple, in order that the people of Rome might be induced to resort to the spot. Cicero's reasons for preferring a temple to a monument, were, that the law had limited the expense of monuments, and, as Gibbon has remarked, the popular superstition of the ancients was not jealous of additions to the number of deities. The preface to the sixth book of Quinctilian's Institutes, in which he deplores the loss of his only surviving son, taken from him at the age of ten years, will probably be thought more deeply pathetic than the celebrated letters of Cicero. He says that a chief motive with him for writing his Institutes was, that if the Fates had been so just and kind as to shorten his own days, his sons might still have their father, through his writings, as their guide and instructor.

Locke, in speaking of the effect of time in curing some diseases of the mind, which reason cannot alleviate, departs from the subdued plainness of his usual manner, in touching upon the grief of a mother for the loss of her child. “The death of a child, that was the daily delight of his mother's eyes, and the joy of her soul, rends from her heart the whole

comfort of her life, and gives her all the torment imaginable. Use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder."

Rasselas visits a philosopher who had just lost his only daughter, but who the day before had been pointing out the precepts, which, if a wise man followed them, he would no more be "emaciated by envy, inflamed by anger, emasculated by tenderness, or depressed by grief." The prince endeavoured to console him with some of his own rhetorical sentiments, but came to a conclusion that the teachers of morality discourse like angels, but live like men."

Among the moderns, Beattie's Minstrel is a beautiful memorial by a parent to a son of genius. But, not to accumulate instances which speak too forcibly the drawbacks on the gift of prolonged existence, it may be permitted to introduce a passage from Burke, especially as a perusal of his writings is essential, if we would know the full effect of the splendid and animated diction which our language affords. Burke shortly after his son's death, retired from public life, and received a pension. This was attacked by the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, whereupon Burke wrote a defence of his own public life in a Letter to Lord Fitswilliam, one of the last of his compositions. In that letter the following passage occurs : But a disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks, which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the

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earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone, I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if, in this hard season, I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege : it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and, under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to shew that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent."

The subject of the present chapter may be properly concluded with some notices of the strength of parental and filial affection as well of its occasional absence or perversion. Gall and his followers declare that parental love is a distinct faculty, seated in the lower extremities of the posterior lobes of the