For those dark caves and mummy repositories are Satan’s abodes, wherein he speculates and rejoices on human vainglory, and keeps those kings and conquerors, whom alive he bewitched, whole for that great day when he will claim his own, and marshal the kings of Nilus and Thebes in sad procession unto the pit.

Death, that fatal necessity which so many would overlook or blinkingly survey, the old Egyptians held continually before their eyes.  Their embalmed ancestors they carried about at their banquets, as holding them still a part of their families, and not thrusting them from their places at feasts.  They wanted not likewise a sad preacher at their tables to admonish them daily of death,—­surely an unnecessary discourse while they banqueted in sepulchres.  Whether this were not making too much of death, as tending to assuefaction, some reason there is to doubt; but certain it is that such practices would hardly be embraced by our modern gourmands, who like not to look on faces of mortua, or be elbowed by mummies.

Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of the builders whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much to raise sepulchres or temples to death as to contemn and disdain it, astonishing heaven with their audacities, and looking forward with delight to their interment in those eternal piles.  Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and, planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crumbling touches of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion.  Yet all were but Babel vanities.  Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams.  History sinketh beneath her cloud.  The traveler, as he paceth amazedly through those deserts, asketh of her, Who builded them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.

Egypt itself is now become the land of obliviousness, and doteth.  Her ancient civility is gone, and her glory hath vanished as a phantasma.  Her youthful days are over, and her face hath become wrinkled and tetric.  She poreth not upon the heavens; astronomy is dead unto her, and knowledge maketh other cycles.  Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth not to the sun, and Nilus heareth strange voices.  Her monuments are but hieroglyphically sempiternal.  Osiris and Anubis, her averruncous deities, have departed, while Orus yet remains dimly shadowing the principle of vicissitude and the effluxion of things, but receiveth little oblation.

FROM ‘A LETTER TO A FRIEND’

He was willing to quit the world alone and altogether, leaving no earnest behind him for corruption or after-grave, having small content in that common satisfaction to survive or live in another, but amply satisfied that his disease should die with himself, nor revive in a posterity to puzzle physic, and make sad mementos of their parent hereditary....