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Nobleman's Vault.

sary and it may be decent, that they who have been elevated in life, should, at the close of it, still keep up their due dignity. But this will not prevent us from meditating in the vault of the nobles; where surely we shall find ample matter for conversation.

By the side of the church where first I was led into these Reflections, such a vault is found. Let me descend into the solemn and sacred recess ! How awful! As I tread slowly down the stone steps, which lead into it, a melancholy murmur seems to echo through the silent mansion; the moon just throws in a faint light, sufficient for me to discern the contents (though indeed no stranger to them) and all my soul thrills with anxious horror!-Whence this strange and uncommon dread upon us, when conversing with the deceased? Helpless dust and ashes as they are, we know they cannot harm or injure us. Nay, and were it possible for any of them to appear to us, surely it would be most delightful and most acceptable to view them, and to hear from them some of the wonders of that world, which is at once so interesting, and so much unknown!

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But ah!--no notice they give,
Nor tell us where, or how they live;
Though conscious while with us below,
How much themselves desired to know!

As if bound up by solemn fate
To keep this secret of their state;
To tell their joys or pains to none,
That man might live by FAITH ALONE.

Oh, come hither, ye sons of ambition, ye children of pride! descend awhile from the lofty summit whereon you stand, and look disdain on all beneath you: oh come and pass a few silent minutes with me in this lonely vault, which boast the most noble inhabitants; and elevation will no more dwell in your eye, or vanity rise in your hearts.

Here are the great and the gay, the young and the brilliant; the honourable and the lovely, placed in no mean order or elegance together. Their coffins are decorated with velvet and with silver; but ah! their contents are only like vulgar dust. There lies the noble ALTAMONT: no won der the remembrance of him first strikes every soul which descends into this vault, and was no

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stranger to his character.

An able writer * hath

given us a striking account of his last moments: let us first recollect this, and then make our reflections upon it.

"I am about to represent you, (says he), the last hours of a person of high birth and high spirit; of great parts, and strong passions, every way accomplished, not least in iniquity. His unkind treatment was the death of a most amiable wife; and his great extravagance, in effect, disinherited his only child."

The sad evening before the death of that noble youth, I was with him. No one was there, but his physician, and an intimate whom he loved, and whom he had ruined. At my coming in, he

said;

"You, and the physician, are come too late— I have neither life nor hope. You both aim at miracles. You would raise the dead."

Heaven, I said, was merciful

"Or I could not have been thus guilty. What has it not done to bless and to save me?—I have

Dr. Young in his Centaur not Fabulous,

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been too strong for Omnipotence! I have plucked down ruin."

I said, the blessed Redeemer

"Hold! hold! you wound me! That is the rock on which I split-I denied his name."

Refusing to hear any thing from me, or to take any thing from the physician, he lay silent, as far as sudden darts of pain would permit, till the clock struck; then with vehemence,

"Oh time! time! It is fit thou should thus strike thy murderer to the heart.-How art thou fled for ever! A month! Oh for a single week! I ask not for years; though an age were too little for the much I have to do."

On my saying we could not do too much; that Heaven was a blessed place

"So much the worse.

'Tis lost; 'tis lost!—

Heaven to me is the severest part of hell!"
Soon after I proposed prayer.

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Pray you that can; I never prayed, I cannot pray.-Nor need I. Is not heaven on my side already? It closes with my conscience. Its severest strokes but second my own."

His friend being much touched even to tears

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at this (who could forbear? I could not) with a most affectionate look, he said;

"Keep those tears for thyself. I have undone thee. Dost thou weep for me?

What can pain me more?”

That is cruel.

Here his friend, too much affected, would have left him.

"No, stay. Thou still may hope;-therefore hear me. How madly have I talked? How madly hast thou listened and believed? But look on my present state, as a full answer to thee, and to myself. This body is all weakness and pain; but my soul, as if stung up by torment to greater strength and spirit, is full powerful to reason; full mighty to suffer. And that, which thus triumphs within the jaws of mortality, is, doubtless, immortal. And as for a deity, nothing less than an Almighty could inflict what I feel."

I was about to congratulate this passive involuntary confessor, on his asserting the two prime articles of his creed, extorted by the rack of nature; when he thus very passionately,

"No, no! let me speak on. I have not long to speak-My much injured friend! my soul, as