Chapter VIII: Part 8

When from the advocate we pass to the bench, and from the feed barrister to the philosophical jurist, a new and majestic vista opens to the view. As in literature, two great divisions mark the legal character: there is the narrow but thoroughly-informed practitioner, and the comprehensive judicial mind,--the first only distinguished within a limited bound of immediate utility and respectable adherence to precedent, and the other a pioneer in the realm of truth, a brave and original minister at the altar of justice. Lord Brougham, in his _Sketches of English Statesmen_, has admirably indicated these two classes. To the former he says, 'The precise dictates of English statutes, and the dictates of English judges and English text-writers, are the standard of justice. They are extremely suspicious of any enlarged or general views upon so serious a subject as law.' The second and higher order of lawyers are well described in his portrait of Lord Grant, of whose charges he remarks: 'Forth came a strain of clear, unbroken fluency, disposing in the most luminous order all the facts and all the arguments in the cause; reducing into clear and simple arrangement the most entangled masses of broken, conflicting statement; settling one doubt by a parenthetical remark, passing over another only more decisive that it was condensed; and giving out the whole impression of the case upon the judge's mind,--the material view, with argument enough to show why he so thought, and to prove him right, and without so much reasoning as to make you forget that it was a judgment you were hearing, and not a speech.' Do we not often find, in literature and in life, counterparts of this picture of a judicial mind? Add to it discovery, and we have the legal philosopher; intrepid love of right, and we recognize the legal reformer. To this noble category belong such lawyers as Mansfield and Marshall, Romilly, Erskine, and Webster. Genius for the bar is as varied in its character as that for poetry or art. In one man the gift is acuteness, in another felicity of language; here, extraordinary perspicuity of statement; there, singular ingenuity of argument. It is rhetoric, manner, force of purpose, a glamour that subdues, or a charm that wins; so that no precise rules, irrespective of individual endowments, can be laid down to secure forensic triumph. Doubtless, however, the union of a sympathetic temperament and an attractive manner, with logical power and native eloquence, form the ideal equipment of the pleader. Erskine seems to have combined these qualities in perfection, and to have woven a spell both for soul and sense. He magnetized, physically and intellectually, his audience. 'Juries,' says his biographer, 'declared that they felt it impossible to remove their looks from him when he had riveted, and, as it were, fascinated them by his first glance; and it used to be a common remark of men who observed his motions, that they resembled those of a blood-horse.'

The tendency to subterfuge in the less highly endowed, is but an incidental liability; in general, law-practice seems to harden and make sceptical the mind absorbed in its details. One can almost invariably detect the keen look of distrust or the smile of incredulity in the physiognomy of the barrister. Everything like sentiment, disinterestedness, and frank demonstration, is apt to be regarded without faith or sympathy. Most lawyers confess that they place no reliance on the statements of their clients. If you introduce a spiritual hypothesis or a practical view of any topic, it is treated by this class of men with ill-concealed scorn. The habit of their minds is logical; they usually ignore and repudiate those instincts which experience seldom reveals to them, and observation of life in its coarser phases leads them to doubt and contemn. But, while thus less open to the gentler and more sacred sympathies, they often possess the distinction of manliness, of courage, and generosity. The very process which so exclusively develops the understanding, and makes their ideal of intellectual greatness to consist in aptitude, subtlety, and reasoning power, tends to give a certain vigour and alertness to the thinking faculty, and to emancipate it from morbid influences. One of Ben Jonson's characters thus defines the lawyer:--

'I oft have heard him say how he admired
Men of your law-profession, that could speak
To every cause and things mere contraries,
Till they were hoarse again, yet all be law.
That, with most quick agility, could turn
And return, make knots and undo them,
Give forked counsel, take provoking gold
On either hand,--and put it up.'

And one of Balzac's characters says:--'Savez-vous, mon cher, qu'il existe dans notre société trois hommes: le prêtre, le médecin, et l'homme de justice, qui ne peuvent pas estimer le monde? Ils ont des robes noires, peut-être parce qu'ils portent le deuil de toutes les vertus, de toutes les illusions. _Le plus malheureux des trois est l'avoué._' When the question at issue is purely utilitarian, and the interest discussed one of outward and practical relations, this legal training comes into eminent efficiency: in a word, it is applicable to affairs, but not to sentiment; to fact, but not to abstract truth. How evanescent is often a great lawyer's fame; often as intangible as that of a great vocalist or actor. Even their eloquence is now rare. Great lawyers are uniformly distrustful of rhetoric, and their power is based on knowledge. We learn from the son and biographer of Chief Justice Parsons, that a special reason of his eminent superiority was that accident gave him early and undisturbed access to the best law library in America. It has been truly said, that the eloquence of the bar has become a tradition; 'it is suspected as impugning sense and knowledge,' and is opposed to the practical spirit of the age. Yet the advocate, like the poet, is occasionally born, not made, notwithstanding the maxim _orator fit_. A mind fertile in expedients, warmed by a temperament which instinctively seizes upon, and, we had almost said, incarnates, a cause, is a phenomenon that sometimes renders law an inspiration instead of a dogma. Such a pleader lately lived in one of the Eastern States. Not only the grasp of his thought, but his elocution, announced that he had literally thrown himself into the case. It would be more strictly correct to say that he had absorbed it. The gesture, the eye, the tone of his voice, the quiver of the muscle, nay, each lock of his long steel-gray hair, that he tossed back from his dripping brow, in the excitement of his fluent harangue, seemed alive and overflowing with the rationale and the sentiment of the cause; his enthusiasm was real, however it may have originated; and, by identifying himself with his client, he espoused the argument as if it were vital to his own interest. Such instances, however, are exceptional; few are the lawyers thus constituted. Accepting their cases objectively, and maintaining them by formula, the usual effect is that which Burke describes in his character of Greville: 'He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences--a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion.'

Why is the poet's function the noblest? Because it is inspired, not arbitrarily decreed by the will. Mental activity is grand and beautiful in proportion as it is disinterested; and it is on account of the almost inevitable forcing, by circumstances, of a lawyer's mind from the line of honest conviction into that of determined casuistry, that the moral objection to the pursuit is so often urged. 'The indiscriminate defence of right and wrong,' says Junius, 'contracts the understanding while it corrupts the heart.' Some men, in conversation, affect us as unreal. We attach no vital interest to what they say, because the mind appears to act wholly apart--the fusion of sense and feeling, which we call soul, is wanting; there is no conviction, no personal sentiment, no unselfish love of truth in what they say; and yet it may be intelligent, erudite, and void of positive falsity--still it is mechanical; the intellect is _used_, not _inspired_; willed to act, not moved thereto: this is the characteristic of legal training, unmodified by the higher sentiments; it makes intellectual machines, logical grist-mills, talkers by rote; the rational powers, from long slavery to temporary and interested aims, seem to have lost magnanimity; their spontaneous, genuine, and earnest action has yielded to a conventional and predetermined habit. Yet at the other extreme we see the most lofty and permanent intellectual results. It has been justly said that the Code Napoleon is even now the sole embodiment of Lord Bacon's thought--'put them (the laws) into shape, inform them with philosophy, reduce them in bulk, give them into every man's hand. Laws are made to guard the rights of the people, not to feed the lawyers.'

Whoever, in the freshness of youthful emotions, has been present at the tribunal of a free country, where the character of the judge, the integrity of the jury, and the learning and eloquence of the advocates have equalled the moral exigencies and the ideal dignity of the scene, and when the case has possessed a high tragic or social interest, can never lose the impression thus derived of the majesty of the law. No public scene of human life can surpass it to the apprehension of a thoughtful spectator. He seems to behold the principle of justice as it exists in the very elements of humanity, and to stand on the primeval foundation of civil society; the searching struggle for truth, the conscientious application of law to evidence, the stern recital of the prosecutor, the appeal of the defence, the constant test of inquiry, of reference to statutes and precedents, the luminous arrangement of conflicting facts by the judge, his impartial deductions and clear final statement, the interval of suspense and the solemn verdict, combine to present a calm, reflective, almost sublime exercise of the intellect and moral sentiments, in order to conform authority to their highest dictates, which elevates and widens the function and the glory of human life and duty. Compare with such a picture the base mockery of justice exhibited by the Inquisition of old, and an Austrian court-martial of our own day; the arbitrary fiat of an Eastern official, and the murderous ordeal of the provisional bodies that ruled during the first French revolution; and it is easy to appreciate the identity of justly-administered law with civilization and freedom. 'Justice,' says Webster, 'is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands, and as long as it is duly honoured, there is a foundation for social security, general happiness, and the improvement and progress of our race; and whoever labours on this edifice with usefulness and distinction, whoever clears its foundations, strengthens its pillars, adorns its entablatures, or contributes to raise its august dome still higher in the skies, connects himself--in name, and fame, and character--with that which is, and must be, as durable as the frame of human society.'

SEPULCHRES.

'The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales,
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadow green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.'--BRYANT.

The comparatively recent and widely-diffused interest in the establishment of rural cemeteries in this country is an auspicious reaction of popular feeling. Never did a Christian nation manifest so little conservative and exalted sentiment, apart from its direct religious scope, as our own. This patent defect is owing, in a measure, to the absence of the venerable, the time-hallowed, and the contemplative in the scenes and the life of our country; it is, however, confirmed by the busy competition, the hurried, experimental, and ambitious spirit of the people. Local change is the rule, not the exception; scorn of wise delay, moderation, and philosophic content, the prevalent feeling; impatience, temerity, and self-confidence, the characteristic impulse; houses are locomotive, church edifices turned into post-offices, and even theatres; ancestral domains are bartered away in the second generation; old trees bow to the axe; the very sea is encroached upon, and landmarks are removed almost as soon as they grow familiar; change, which is the life of Nature, seems to be regarded as not less the vital element of what is called local improvement and prosperity; the future is almost exclusively regarded, and the past contemned.

If a man cites the precedents of experience, he is sneered at as a 'fogy;' if he has a competence, he risks it in speculation; newspapers usurp the attention once given to standard lore; the picturesque rocks of the rural wayside are defiled by quack advertisements, the arcana of spirituality degraded by legerdemain, the dignity of reputation sullied by partisan brutality, the graces of social refinement abrogated by a mercenary standard, the lofty aims of science levelled by charlatan tricks, and independence of character sacrificed to debasing conformity; observation is lost in locomotion, thought in action, ideality in materialism. Against this perversion of life the sanctity of death protests, often vainly to the general mind, but not ineffectually to the individual heart.

When it was attempted to secure the collection of Egyptian antiquities brought hither by Dr. Abbott, of Cairo, for a future scientific museum to be established in New York, the representatives--commercial, professional, and speculative--of 'Young America' scorned the bare idea of exchanging gold for mummies, sepulchral lamps, papyrus, and ancient utensils and inscriptions; yet, within a twelvemonth, a celebrated German philologist, a native biblical scholar, and a lecturer on the History of Art, eagerly availed themselves of these contemned relics to prove and illustrate their respective subjects; and the enlightened of Gotham's utilitarian citizens acknowledged that the trophies of the past were essential to elucidate and confirm the wisdom of the present. It is this idolatry of the immediate which stultifies republican perception. Offer a manuscript to a publisher, and he instantly inquires if it relates to the questions of the day; if not, it is almost certain to be rejected without examination. The conservative element of social life is merged in gregarious intercourse; the youth looks not up to age; the maiden's susceptibilities are hardened by premature and promiscuous association; external success is glorified, private consistency unhonoured; art becomes a trade, literature an expedient, reform fanaticism; aspiration is chilled, romance outgrown, life unappreciated; and all because the vista of departed time is cut off from our theory of moral perspective, and existence itself is regarded merely as an opportunity for instant and outward success, not a link in an eternal chain reaching 'before and after.'

Sentiment is the great conservative principle of society; those instincts of patriotism, local attachment, family affection, human sympathy, reverence for truth, age, valour, and wisdom, so often alive and conscious in the child, and overlaid or perverted in the man,--for the culture of which our educational systems, habitual vocations, domestic and social life, make so little provision,--are, in the last analysis, the elements of whatever is noble, efficient, and individual in character; in every moral crisis we appeal to them, as the channels whereby we are linked to God and humanity, and through which alone we can realize just views or lawful action. In our normal condition they may not be often exhibited; yet none the less they constitute the latent force of civil society. To depend upon intelligence and will is, indeed, the creed of the age, and especially of this Republic; but these powers, when unhallowed by the primal and better instincts, react and fail of their end. It is so in individual experience and in national affairs. The absence of the sentiments which the pride of intellect and the brutality of self-will thus repudiate, is the occasion of our greatest errors; to them is the final appeal, through them the only safety; and their violation was the precursor of base and bloody treason; their vindication but the renewal through sacrifice of a normal and vital interest of human society. The war for the Union has been expiatory not less than patriotic. And the great lesson taught by these and similar errors is, that the life, the spirit, the faith of the country had, by a long course of national prosperity and a blind worship of outward success, become gradually but inevitably material; so that motives of patriotism, of reverence, of courtesy, of generous sympathy,--in a word, the sentiments, as distinguished from the passions and the will, had ceased to be recognized as legitimate, and the reliable springs of action and guides of life. It was the repudiation of these which horrified Burke at the outbreak of the French Revolution; he augured the worst from that event, at the best hour of its triumph, because it stripped Humanity of her divine attribute of sentiment, and left her to shiver naked in the cold light of reason and will, unredeemed by the sense of justice, of beauty, of compassion, of honourable pride, which under the name of chivalry he lamented as extinct. He spoke and felt as a man whose brain was kindled by his heart, and whose heart retained the pure impulse of these sacred instincts, and knew their value as the medium of all truth and the basis of civil order. They were temporarily quenched in France by the frenzy of want; they are inactive and in abeyance here, through the gross pressure of material prosperity and mercenary ambition. Hence whatever effectively appeals to them, and whoever sincerely recognizes them, whether by example or precept, in a life or a poem, through art or rhetoric, in respect for the past, love of nature, or devotion to truth and beauty, excites our cordial sympathy. In this age and land, no man is a greater benefactor than he who scorns the worldly and narrow philosophy of life which degrades to a material, unaspiring level the tone of mind and the tendency of the affections. If he invent a character, lay out a domain, erect a statue, weave a stanza, write a paragraph, utter a word, or chant a melody which stirs in any breast the love of the beautiful, admiration for the heroic, or the chastening sense of awe,--any sentiment, in truth, which partakes of disinterestedness, and merges self 'in an idea dearer than self,'--uplifts, expands, fortifies, intensifies, and therefore inspires,--he is essentially and absolutely a benefactor to society, a genuine though perhaps unrecognized champion of what is 'highest in man's nature' against what is 'lowest in man's destiny.' And not the least because the most universal of these higher and holier feelings is the sentiment of Death, consecrating its symbols, guarding its relics, and keeping fresh and sacred its memories.

The disposition of the mortal remains was, and is, to a considerable extent, in England, an ecclesiastical function; in Catholic lands it is a priestly interest. Indignity to the body, after death, was one of the most dreaded punishments of heresy and crime; to scatter human ashes to the winds, expose the skulls of malefactors in iron gratings over city portals, refuse interment in ground consecrated by the church, and disinter and insult the body of an unpopular ruler, were among the barbarous reprisals of offended power. And yet, in these same twilight eras, in the heathen customs and the mediæval laws, under the sway of Odin and the Franks, the sentiment of respect for the dead was acted upon in a manner to shame the indifference and hardihood of later and more civilized times. With the emigration to America, this sentiment looked for its legal vindication entirely to the civic authority. With their reaction from spiritual tyranny, our ancestors transferred this, with other social interests, to popular legislation and private inclination. Hence the comparatively indefinite enactments on the subject, and the need of a uniform code, applicable to all the States, and organized so as clearly to establish the rights both of the living and the dead, and to preserve inviolable the choice of disposition, and the place of deposit, of human remains.

The practical treatment of this subject is anomalous. Amid the scenes of horror, outraging humanity in every form, which characterized the anarchy incident to the first dethronement of legitimate authority in France, how startling to read, among the first decrees of the Convention, provisions for the dead, while pitiless destruction awaited the living! And in this country, while motives of _hygiène_ limit intermural interments, and a higher impulse sets apart and adorns rural cemeteries, our rail-tracks still often ruthlessly intersect the fields of the dead, and ancestral tombs are annually broken up to make way for streets and warehouses. The tomb of Washington was long dilapidated; the bones of Revolutionary martyrs are neglected, and half the graveyards of the country desecrated by indifference or misuse. The conservative piety of the Hebrews reproaches our inconsiderate neglect, in the faithfully-tended cemetery of their race at Newport, R. I., where not a Jew remains to gather the ashes of his fathers, thus carefully preserved by a testamentary fund. Of late years elaborate monuments in rural cemeteries have done much to redeem this once proverbial neglect. They constitute the most sacred adornment of the environs of our principal cities.

Both the modes and places of burial have an historical significance. The pyre of the Greeks and Romans, the embalming process of the Egyptians, the funeral piles of Hindoo superstition, and those bark stagings, curiously regarded by Mississippi voyagers, where Indian corpses are exposed to the elements,--the old cross-road interment of the suicide, the inhumation of the early patriarchs and Christians,--all symbolize eras and creeds. The lying-in-state of the royal defunct, the sable catafalque of the Catholic temples, the salutes over the warrior's grave, the 'Day of the Dead' celebrated in Southern Europe, the eulogies in French cemeteries, the sublime ritual of the Establishment, and the silent prayer of the Friends,--requiems, processions, emblems, inscriptions, badges, and funereal garlands,--mark faith, nation, rank, and profession at the very gates of the sepulchre. Vain is the sceptic's sneer, useless the utilitarian's protest; by these poor tributes the heart utters its undying regret and its immortal prophecies, though 'mummy has become merchandise,' and to be 'but pyramidically extant is a fallacy in duration;' for, as the same religious philosopher[23] of Norwich declared, 'it is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature;' and, therefore, in the grim Tuscan's Hell, the souls of those who denied their immortality when in the flesh, are shut up through eternity in living tombs. How the idea of a local abode for the mortal remains is hallowed to our nature, is realized in the pathos which closes the noble and sacred life of the Hebrew lawgiver: 'And he buried him in a valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.'[24] Etruria's best relics are sepulchral urns. Social distinctions are as obvious in the tombs of the ancients as in their palaces: witness the Columbarium in ruins, and the fresh pit of the plebeians; the sandy isles of the Venetian cemetery, and Pompeii's street of tombs. Byron thought '_Implora pace_' the most affecting of epitaphs; and the visitor at Coppet recognizes a melancholy appropriateness, in the garden-grave of its gifted mistress.

Natural, therefore, and human, is the consoling thought of the poet, of the ship bringing home for burial all of earth that remains of his lamented friend:--

'I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night;
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.

'Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,
And travelled men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And thy dark freight, a vanished life.

'So bring him: we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies; O, to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems

'To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,

'Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom deep in brine;
And hands so often clasped in mine
Should toss with tangle and with shells.'[25]

Doubtless many of the processes adopted by blind affection and superstitious homage, to rescue the poor human casket from destruction, are grotesque and undesirable. Had Segato, the discoverer of a chemical method of petrifying flesh, survived to publish the secret, it would be chiefly for anatomical purposes that we should appreciate his invention; there is something revolting in the artificial conservation of what, by the law of Nature, should undergo elemental dissolution; and it is but a senseless homage to cling to the shattered chrysalis when the winged embryo has soared away:

'All' ombra de' cipressi e dentro l'urne
Confortate di pianto, è forse il sonno
Delia morte men duro?'[26]

Nature sometimes is a conservative mother even of mortal lineaments; in glacier or tarn, in _tuffo_ and limestone fossils, she keeps for ages the entire relics of humanity. The fantastic array of human bones in the Capuchin cells at Palermo and Rome; the eyeless, shrunken face of Carlo Borromeo embedded in crystal, jewels, and silk, beneath the Milan cathedral; the fleshless figure of old Jeremy Bentham in the raiment of this working-day world; the thousand spicy wrappings which enfold the exhumed mummy whose exhibition provoked Horace Smith's facetious rhymes,--these, and such as these, poor attempts to do vain honour to our clay, are not less repugnant to the sentiment of death, in its religious and enlightened manifestation, than the promiscuous and careless putting out of sight of the dead after battle and in the reign of pestilence, or the brutal and irreverent disposal of the bodies of the poor in the diurnal pits of the Naples Campo Santo. More accordant with our sense of respect to what once enshrined an immortal spirit, and stood erect and free, even in barbaric manhood, is the adjuration of the bard:--

'Gather him to his grave again,
And solemnly and softly lay,
Beneath the verdure of the plain,
The warrior's scattered bones away;
The soul hath quickened every part,--
That remnant of a martial brow,
Those ribs that held the mighty heart,
That strong arm,--strong no longer now!
Spare them, each mouldering relic spare,
Of God's own image; let them rest,
Till not a trace shall speak of where
The awful likeness was impressed.'

Yet there are many and judicious reasons for preferring cremation to inhumation; the prejudice against the former having doubtless originated among the early Christians, in their respect for patriarchal entombment, practised by the Jews, and their natural horror at any custom which savoured of heathenism. But there is actually no religious obstacle, and, under proper arrangement, no public inconvenience, in the burning of the dead. It is, too, a process which singularly attracts those who would save the remains of those they love from the possibility of desecration, and anticipate the ultimate fate of the mortal coil 'to mix for ever with the elements;' at all events, there can be no rational objection to the exercise of private taste, and the gratification of personal feeling on this point. 'I bequeath my soul to God,' said Michael Angelo, in his terse will, 'my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest kin;'--and this right to dispose of one's mortal remains appears to be instinctive; though the indignation excited by any departure from custom would indicate that, in popular apprehension, the privilege so rarely exercised is illegally usurped.

The outcry in a Western town, a few years ago, when cremation was resorted to, at the earnest desire of a deceased wife; and the offence taken and expressed in an Eastern city, when it became known that a distinguished surgeon, from respect to science, had bequeathed his skeleton to a medical college; evidence how little, among us, is recognized the right of the living to dispose of their remains, and the extent to which popular ignorance and individual prejudice are allowed to interfere in what good sense and good feeling declare an especial matter of private concern. Yet that other than the ordinary modes of disposing of human relics are not absolutely repugnant to endearing associations, may be inferred from the poetic interest which sanctions to the imagination the obsequies of Shelley. Although it was from convenience that the body of that ideal bard, so misunderstood, so humane, so 'cradled into poesy by wrong,' was burned, yet the lover of his spiritual muse beholds in that lonely pyre, blazing on the shores of the Mediterranean, an elemental destruction of the material shrine of a lofty and loving soul, accordant with his aspiring, isolated, and imaginative career.[27]

Vain, indeed, have proved the studious precautions of Egyptians to conserve from decay and sacrilege the relics of their dead. Not only has 'mummy become merchandise,' in the limited sense of the English moralist; the traffic of the Jews in their gums and spices, the distribution of their exhumed forms in museums, and the use of their cases for fuel, is now superseded by commerce in their cerements for the manufacture of paper; and it is a startling evidence of that human vicissitude from which even the shrouds of ancient kings are not exempt, that recently, in one of the new towns of this continent, a newspaper was printed on sheets made from the imported rags of Egyptian mummies.

Of primitive and casual landmarks, encountered on solitary moors and hills, the cairn and the Alpine cross affect the imagination with a sense alike of mortality and tributary sentiment, even more vividly than the elaborate mausoleum, from the rude expedients and the solemn isolation; while the beauty of cathedral architecture is hallowed by ancestral monuments. Of all Scott's characters, the one that most deeply enlists our sympathies, through that quaint pathos whereby the Past is made eloquent both to fancy and affection, is Old Mortality renewing the half-obliterated inscriptions on the gravestones of the Covenanters, his white hair fluttering in the wind as he stoops to his melancholy task, and his aged pony feeding on the grassy mounds. Even our practical Franklin seized the first leisure from patriotic duties, on his visit to England, in order to examine the sepulchral tablets which bear the names of his progenitors.

A cursory glance at the most cherished trophies of literature indicates how deeply the sentiment of death is wrought into the mind and imagination,--how it invests with awe, love, pity, and hope, thoughtful and gifted spirits, inspires their art, elevates their conceptions, and casts over life and consciousness a sacred mystery. The most finished and suggestive piece of modern English verse is elegiac,--its theme a country churchyard, and so instinct are its melancholy numbers with pathos and reflection, embalmed in rhythmical music, that its lines have passed into household words. Our national poet, who has sung of Nature in all her characteristic phases on this continent, next to those ever-renewed glories of the universe has found his chief inspiration in the same reverent contemplation: _Thanatopsis_ was his first grand offering to the Muses, and _The Disinterred Warrior_, the _Hymn to Death_, and _The Old Man's Funeral_, are but pious variations of a strain worthy to be chanted in the temple of humanity. Shakspeare in no instance comes nearer what is highest in our common nature and miraculous in our experience, than when he makes the philosophic Dane question his soul and confront mortality. The once popular and ever-memorable _Night Thoughts_ of Young elaborate kindred ideas in the light of Christian truth; the most quaintly eloquent of early speculative writings in English prose is Sir Thomas Browne's treatise on Urn-Burial. The most thoughtful and earnest of modern Italian poems is Foscolo's _Sepolchri_; the Monody on Sir John Moore, Shelley's Elegy on Keats, Tickell's on Addison, Byron's on Sheridan, and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, contain the most sincere and harmonious utterances of their authors. Not the least affecting pages of _The Sketch Book_ are those which describe the 'Village Funeral' and the 'Widow's Son;' and the endeared author has marked his own sense of the local sanctity of the grave by selecting that of his family in 'Sleepy Hollow,' in the midst of scenes endeared by his abode and his fame. Halleck has given lyrical immortality to the warrior's death in the cause of freedom; and Wordsworth, in perhaps his most quoted ballad, has recorded with exquisite simplicity childhood's unconsciousness of death; even the most analytical of French novelists found, in the laws and ceremonial of a Parisian interment, material for his keenest diagnosis of the scenes of life in that marvellous capital. Hope's best descriptive powers were enlisted in his sketch of burial-places near Constantinople, so pensively contrasting with the more adventurous chapters of Anastasius. If in popular literature this sentiment is so constantly appealed to, and so enshrined in the poet's dream and the philosopher's speculation, classic and Hebrew authors have inscribed its memorials in outlines of majestic and graceful import; around it the picturesque and the moralizing, the vivacious and the grandly simple expressions of the Roman, the Greek, and the Jewish writers seem to hover with the significant plaint--heroism or faith--which invokes us, with the voice of ages, to

'Pay the deep reverence taught of old,
The homage of man's heart to death;
Nor dare to trifle with the mould
Once hallowed by the Almighty's breath.'

Perhaps there is no instance of this vague and awful interest more memorable to the American than when he reads, on some ancient tablet in the Old World, the burial record of his ancestors.

The monitory and reminiscent influence of the churchyard, apart from all personal associations, cannot, indeed, be over-estimated; doubtless in a spirit of propriety and good taste, it is now more frequently suburban, made attractive by trees, flowers, a wide landscape, and rural peace, and rendered comparatively safe from desecration by distance from the so-called march of improvement which annually changes the aspect of our growing towns. Yet, wherever situated, the homes of the dead, when made eloquent by art, and kept fresh by reverent care, breathe a chastening and holy lesson, perhaps the more impressive when uttered beside the teeming camp of life. To the traveller in Europe it is a pathetic sight to watch the Norwegian peasants strew flowers, every Sabbath, on the graves of their kindred, and gives a living interest to the memorials of Scandinavian antiquity gathered in the museums, whereby, through the weapons and drinking-cups of stone, bronze, and iron, exhumed from graves, he traces the origin and growth of that remote civilization. And when time has softened the most acute and bitter memories of the War for the Union, what monument to individual prowess, what trophy of patriotic self-sacrifice will compare, in solemn and elevating pathos, with the impression derived from the 'national cemeteries' of the battle-field and the hospital? As Lincoln said of Gettysburg,--'they will dedicate us afresh to our country, to humanity, and to God.'

When the traveller gazes on the marble effigy of the warrior at Ravenna, and then treads the plain where Gaston de Foix fell in battle, the fixed lineaments and obsolete armour bring home to his mind the very life of the middle ages, solemnized by youthful heroism and early death; when he scans the vast city beneath its smoky veil--thick with roofs and dotted with spires,--from an elevated point of Père la Chaise, the humble and garlanded cross, and the chiselled names of the wise and brave that surround him, cause the parallel and inwoven mysteries of life and death to stir the fountains of his heart with awe, and make his lips tremble into prayer; and, familiar as is the spectacle, the more thoughtful of the throng in New York's bustling thoroughfare will sometimes pause and cast a salutary glance from the hurrying crowd to the monuments of the heroic Lawrence, the eloquent Emmet, the gallant Montgomery, and the patriotic Hamilton. Those associations which form at once the culture and the romance of travel are identified with the same eternal sentiment. Next in interest to the monuments of genius and character are those of death; or rather, the inspiration of the former are everywhere consecrated by the latter.

'Take the wings
Of morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings,--yet the dead are there!'

Nero dug his own grave, lest he should be denied burial, and Shakspeare guarded his own ashes by an imprecatory epitaph; David praises the men of Jabesh Gilead who rescue the bones of their king from the enemy. It is a sweet custom,--that of making little excavations in sepulchral slabs to catch the rain, that birds may be lured thither to drink and sing. The Chinese sell themselves in order to obtain means to bury their parents.

We enter a city of antiquity--memorable Syracuse or disinterred Pompeii--through a street of tombs; the majestic relics of Egyptian civilization are the cenotaphs of kings; the Escurial is Spain's architectural elegy; Abelard's philosophy is superseded, but his love and death live daily to the vision of the mourners who go from the gay capital of France, to place chaplets on the graves of departed friends;[28] the grandeurs of Westminster Abbey are sublimated by the effigies of bards and statesmen, and the rare music of St. George's choir made solemn by the dust of royalty; deserted Ravenna is peopled with intense life by the creations of Dante which haunt his sepulchre; Arqua is the shrine of affectionate pilgrims; the radiant hues and graceful shapes of Titian and Canova become ethereal to the fancy, when viewed beside their monuments; St. Peter's is but a magnificent apostolic tomb; and the shadow of mortality is incarnated in Lorenzo's brooding figure in the jewelled temple of the dead Medici. Even the dim, half-explored catacombs of Rome yield significant testimony to the Christian's heart to-day. 'The works of painting found within them,' well says a recent writer, 'their construction, the inscriptions on the graves,--all unite in bearing witness to the simplicity of the faith, the purity of the doctrine, the strength of the feeling, the change in the lives of the vast mass of the members of the early church of Christ.'[29]

What resorts are Santa Croce, Mount Vernon, Saint Paul's, and Saint Onofrio! What a goal, through ages, the Holy Sepulchre! How the dim escutcheons sanctify cathedrals, and sunken headstones the rural cemetery! How sacred the mystery of the Campagna hid in that 'stern round tower of other days,' which bears the name of a Roman matron! The beautiful sarcophagus of Scipio, the feudal crypt of Theodric, the silent soldier of the Invalides, the mossy cone of Caius Cæstus, in whose shadow two English poets[30] yet speak in graceful epitaphs, Thorwaldsen's grand mausoleum at Copenhagen, composed of his own trophies,--what objects are these to win the mind back into the lapsing ages, and upward with 'immortal longings!' We turn from brilliant thoroughfares, alive with creatures of a day, to catacombs obscure with the impalpable dust of bygone generations; we pass from the vociferous piazza to the hushed and frescoed cloister, and walk on mural tablets whose inscriptions are worn by the feet of vanished multitudes; we steal from the cheerful highway to the field of mounds, where a shaft, a cross, or a garland breathes of surviving tenderness; we handle the cloudy lachrymal, quaint depository of long-evaporated tears, or admire the sculptured urn, the casket of what was unutterably precious, even in mortality; and thereby life is solemnized, consciousness deepened, and we feel, above the tyrannous present, and through the casual occupation of the hour, the 'electric chain wherewith we're darkly bound.' 'When I look upon the tombs of the great,' says Addison, 'every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.' Thus perpetual is the hymn of death, thus ubiquitous its memorials--attesting not only an inevitable destiny, but a universal sentiment; under whatever name,--God's Acre, Pantheon, Campo Santo, Valhalla, Potter's Field, Greenwood, or Mount Auburn,--the last resting-place of the body, the last earthly shrine of human love, fame, and sorrow, claims--by the pious instinct which originates, the holy rites which consecrate, the blessed hopes which glorify it--respect, protection, and sanctity.

There is, indeed, no spot of earth so hallowed to the contemplative as that which holds the ashes of an intellectual benefactor. What a grateful tribute does the trans-atlantic pilgrim instinctively offer at the sepulchre of Roscoe at Liverpool, of Lafayette in France, of Berkeley at Oxford, of Burns at Alloway Kirk, and of Keats and Goldsmith,--of all the bards, philosophers, and reformers whose conceptions warmed and exalted his dawning intelligence, and became thereby sacred to his memory for ever! How fruitful the hours--snatched from less serene pleasure--devoted to Stratford, Melrose, and the Abbey! To realize the value of these opportunities, the spirit of humanity enshrined in such 'Meccas of the mind,' we must fancy the barrenness of earth stripped of these landmarks of the gifted and the lost. How denuded of its most tender light would be Olney, Stoke Pogis, the vale of Florence, the cypress groves of Rome, and the park at Weimar, unconsecrated by the sepulchres of Cowper and Gray, Michael Angelo, Tasso, and Schiller, whose sweet and lofty remembrance links meadow and stream, mountain and sunset, with the thought of all that is most pensive, beautiful, and sublime in genius and in woe.

ACTORS.

'All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.'
JACQUES.

Dramatic talent is far more common than is usually believed. In every family where decided traits of character prevail, it is spontaneously exhibited; and no intimate circle of friends in which a perfect mutual understanding and entire frankness exist, can often meet without an instinctive development of a propensity and a gift innate in all intelligent and genial minds; either in the play of humour, in graphic narrative, in skilful imitation, or the accidental turn of conversation, the dramatic appears, and we have only to look and listen objectively, to find the scene and the dialogue 'as good as a play.' Almost every community has its self-elected buffoons, its volunteer harlequins, and its involuntary actors, who, carried away by the spur of vanity or the overflow of enthusiasm, vividly represent either the ludicrous, the characteristic, or the impassioned in human nature. To the imaginative, observant, and susceptible, 'all the world's a stage,' and men and women 'merely players;' or, rather, there are times when the aspects of society thus impress us. There is, too, a dramatic instinct in the very consciousness of imaginative and impassioned natures, who, to use the words of a woman of genius, yield to 'un besoin inné qu'elles éprouvent de dramatiser leur existence à leurs propres yeux.' A national dramatic language has ever been recognized in the responsive vivacity of the Italian manners, the theatrical bearing of the French, and the proud reticence of the Spaniard; these traits are infinitely modified to the eye of scientific observation; and are the direct and significant language of temperament, race, and character. It is, perhaps, because the elements of the dramatic art are thus universal, that its professors are so little esteemed, unless of the very highest order. It is certainly true of most of the celebrated performers that they have been unhappy, and averse to their children adopting the vocation.

To appreciate the significance of elocutionary art, we have but to consider that all poetry and rhetoric need interpretation. To the multitude, in its printed or written form, the word of genius is often as much a sealed book as the notes of a fine musical composition to one uninitiated as to the meaning of those occult signs of harmony. Wordsworth gained many converts to his poetical theory by the impressive manner in which he recited his verses, who would have remained insensible to their worth if only the force of reasoning had been used. The popularity of many English lyrics and dramatic scenes is owing to the emphasis given them, in the memory, by felicitous declaimers. How different is the Church Service, an old ballad, an oration, the sentiment of Tennyson, the chivalry of Campbell, or the ardent gloom of Byron, when melodiously and intelligently uttered: only those who really feel the sense or pathos of a poem, win others adequately to receive it; and there now lie neglected heaps of noble verse, the latent music of which has not been vocally eliminated. In this view, the requisite combination of voice, sensibility, and intelligence, that constitute a good elocutionist, is an endowment of inestimable value. Lee, the dramatist, used to read his plays so effectively that it discouraged the actors from undertaking them; and the crowds that listen attentively to an able reader of Shakspeare, indicate the extent of public taste for this unappreciated and rarely cultivated accomplishment. Kean gave 'a local habitation,' in the minds of thousands, to Shaksperian inspiration; his surviving auditors are yet haunted by his tones; his inflections and emphasis sculptured, as it were, with a breath, upon memory, words that had previously left only a transient impression. Had we, in our Western civilization, a profession analogous to the improvisatore of the South, or the story-teller of the East, to make familiar and impressive the utterance of our poets, they need not fear comparison with the ancient bards of the people. Tasso and Ariosto are read to this day, in squares and on quays in Italy, to swarthy and tattered groups, who applaud a good line as if it were a new candidate for fame; and, notwithstanding the aversion of the highly intellectual to the theatre, Shakspeare became domesticated in the English mind through the interpretation of histrionic genius. It is on account of this vital connection between literature and elocution, this absolute need of a popular exposition of what otherwise would never penetrate the common mind, that the decadence of the Stage is to be regretted, and the recognition of elocution as a high, graceful, and useful art is desirable. We have an abundance of critics; we need expositors, artists to embody in clear, emphatic, and justly-modulated tones, the graces and the thoughts which minstrel and philosopher have elaborated; this would awaken moral sympathy, give a social interest to the pleasures of literature, and wing words of truth and beauty over the world. It is in view of such an office that the actor rises to dignity; and that such a 'great simple being' as Mrs. Siddons was consoled, when insulted by an audience, for her 'consciousness of a humiliating vocation;' and that Kean, wayward and dissolute, recklessly leaping the barrier of civilization, like Freneau's Indian boy who ran from college to the woods, reappears to the fancy as a genuine minister at the altar of humanity. Talma's life was coincident with some of the greatest events of the century; and his social position is a noble vindication of histrionic genius in alliance with superior character. Associated with the literary men of his country, and befriended by her statesmen, his reminiscences are quite as interesting as his professional triumphs. Intimate with Chenier, David, and Danton, he was admired and cherished by Napoleon. Like Kean his earliest attempts failed, and like Garrick he was a reformer in his art. The philosophy of dramatic personation as regarded by such a man has a peculiar interest. 'Acting,' he said, 'is a complete paradox; we must possess the power of strong feeling, or we could never command and carry with us the sympathy of a mixed audience in a crowded theatre; but we must, at the same time, control our sensations on the stage, for their indulgence would enfeeble execution. The skilful actor calculates his effects beforehand; the voice, gesture, and look which pass for inspiration, have been rehearsed a hundred times. On the other hand, a dull, composed, phlegmatic nature can never make a great actor.' Talma's introduction of Kemble's toga in the Roman plays, his teaching Bonaparte to play king, according to the famous _on-dit_, his matchless dignity and elocution, his English affinities, his charming talk, his select circle of friends, his prosperous style of living, and the new rank he gave his vocation, combine to endear and elevate his memory.

In an historical view the relation of actors to society, art, letters, and religion, offers many curious problems: _protégés_ of the State in the palmy days of Greece, with the purely secular interest attached to the stage under the Romans it degenerated; yet Cicero profited by the instructions of Roscius, and gained for him an important suit; and while Augustus decreed that 'players were exempt from stripes,' later edicts declared 'that no senators should enter the houses of pantomimes, and that Roman knights should not attend them in the streets.' Excommunicated by the Church of Rome in the middle ages, they gave vital scope and character to Spanish literature by evoking the rich and national materials of that extraordinary drama of which Calderon and Lope de Vega are the permanent expositors. Its history shows how, from religious comedies to historical and social plays, the representatives of the stage in Spain fostered her intellectual development and only popular culture, 'until there was hardly a village that did not possess some kind of a theatre.' The actors at Madrid 'constituted no less than forty companies,' and 'secular comedies of a very equivocal complexion were represented in some of the principal monasteries of the kingdom.' The conduct of the Spanish actors, however, according to the same testimony,[31] 'did more than anything else to endanger the privileges of the drama.' Their personal lot seems to have been as hard as the worst of their successors; 'slaves in Algiers were better off.' In France, political, social, and literary life and labour are often so related to or influenced by the renowned _artistes_ of the stage, that they figure as an inevitable element in popular memoirs; nowhere is the influence of the profession so direct and absolute; and while the rise of German literature and liberalism is identified with the advent of dramatic genius and the national revival of the theatre, in England the most distinctive and pervading glory of her intellectual character and fame is the offspring of this form of letters and this phase of social recreative art. The biographies of the most celebrated and endeared authors, from Alfieri to Irving, and from Goëthe to Wilson, indicate that dramatic entertainments, whether Italian opera or the English stage in its prime, court-plays at Weimar, or Terry at Edinburgh, are to them the most available recuperative and inspiring of pastimes.