is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to honour.  It was intended for Westminster Abbey.  I rejoice at the preference given to prose Latinity.

The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either insipid or silly.  But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial: 

’UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.

Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep. 
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.’

Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called The Epigrammatists, published in Bohn’s Standard Library, calls these lines a model of simplicity and elegance.  So they are, but they are very vague.  But then the child was very young.  Erotion, one must remember, was six years old.  Ben Jonson’s beautiful epitaph on S.P., a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel, beginning,

’Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed
Death’s self is sorry,’

is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those sober realities.  The flippant epitaph is always abominable.  Gay’s, for example: 

’Life is a jest, and all things show it. 
I thought so once, but now I know it.’

But does he know it?  Ay, there’s the rub!  The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs.  There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways.  Coleridge’s epitaph for himself is a striking exception: 

’Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he. 
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death! 
Mercy for praise—­to be forgiven for fame,
He ask’d and hoped through Christ.  Do thou the same.’

‘HANSARD’

’Men are we, and must mourn when e’en the shade of that which once was great has passed away.’  This quotation—­which, in obedience to the prevailing taste, I print as prose—­was forced upon me by reading in the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of Hansard’s Parliamentary History and Debates were exposed for sale, and, it must be added, to ridicule.  Yet ‘Hansard’ was once a name to conjure with.  To be in it was an ambition—­costly, troublesome, but animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship.  No wonder that unimaginative men still believed that Hansard was a property with money in it.