So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one :

"And then-he died. Behold before ye

Humanity's poor sum and story;
Life-death-and all that is of glory."

And again, in the same poet's chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill-is followed by one beginning,

"But he died! and he was buried

In his tomb of sculptured stone," etc.

And once again, in one of this author's dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a foiled potentiality "of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been

Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;

Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan."

Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, "amusing himself," as the phrase then rannot quite in our frivolous sense-with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. The "Spectator" could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man's life. "One is so certain of the man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it." The man—a man-any man-every man. It is the common lot. And we know what James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the stanzas that are most to the purpose :—

There lived a man-lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured-enjoyed the common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer :

"Yit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde,

In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde."

A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance, in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced the battle of Poitiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact, the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, "Martin est mort,"-Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and, farther on again, "Charles, maire du palais, est mort." Martin was an unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that "tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces premiers chroniqueurs." "We must all go, that is certain," writes Mrs. Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, "and 'tis the only thing that is certain. Kaì àñelave ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend Hippocrates." All the physician's cases have the same terminal affix, And he died. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts it in his fine poem of "Saul,"

"But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last."

We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is commemorated in Milman's "Latin Christianity," that the ardour of youth had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne's death. That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot, struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but working in and walking by faith, not sight.

Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been themselves immortal.

Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of preservation-by Gibbon, for example-of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this," that one thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as elsewhere." Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced .the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all." Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature was the imagina

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Perhaps a better version of perhaps the same story is that of the young Dauphin exclaiming to his right reverend preceptor, when some book mentioned a king as having died, "Quoi donc, les rois meurent-ils ?" Quelquefois, monseigneur,' was the reply-ironical, or parasitical, as may be.

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tion of his own decease. And Commines relates how physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, "pour lui allonger la vie. Toutefois le tout n'y fasoit rien; et falloit qu'il passât par là où les autres ont passés." And he died. All stories have the same ending.

"The Frenchman first in literary fame;

Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same,

With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied,

Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily-and died."

That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom one fine line," Warton was called "the indulgent historian of our poetry," tells his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton's critic, bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet's utterance :

"O! mortal folke, you may beholde and see

Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight.
The end of joye and prosperitie

Is death at last thorough his course and might.
After the day there cometh the dark night,
For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to evensong-"

"Ringeth," says Mrs. Browning, "in our ear with a soft and solemn music, to which the soul is prodigal of echoes."

What asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations, discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone, of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many; but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,-and these are of them in the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out generation after generation of civic worthies: "So with the tomb of the old Master of the

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