stone.  It is in its nature too poignant and transitory.  A husband meditating by his wife’s grave would throw off such a feeling, and would give voice to it; and it would be in its place in a Monody to her memory; but if I am not mistaken, ought to have been suppressed here, or uttered after a different manner.  The implied impersonation of the deceased (according to the tenor of what has before been said) ought to have been more general and shadowy.

    And if so fair, from vanity as free,
    As firm in friendship and as fond in love;
    Tell them—­

These are two sweet verses, but the word ‘fair’ is improper; for unquestionably it was not intended that their title to receive this assurance should depend at all upon their personal beauty.  Moreover in this couplet and in what follows, the long suspension of the sense excites the expectation of a thought less common than the concluding one; and is an instance of a failure in doing what is most needful and most difficult in an epitaph to do; namely to give to universally received truths a pathos and spirit which shall re-admit them into the soul like revelations of the moment.

I have said that this excellence is difficult to attain; and why?  Is it because nature is weak?  No!  Where the soul has been thoroughly stricken (and Heaven knows the course of life must have placed all men, at some time or other, in that condition) there is never a want of positive strength; but because the adversary of Nature (call that adversary Art or by what name you will) is comparatively strong.  The far-searching influence of the power, which, for want of a better name, we will denominate Taste, is in nothing more evinced than in the changeful character and complexion of that species of composition which we have been reviewing.  Upon a call so urgent, it might be expected that the affections, the memory, and the imagination would be constrained to speak their genuine language.  Yet, if the few specimens which have been given in the course of this enquiry, do not demonstrate the fact, the Reader need only look into any collection of Epitaphs to be convinced, that the faults predominant in the literature of every age will be as strongly reflected in the sepulchral inscriptions as any where; nay perhaps more so, from the anxiety of the Author to do justice to the occasion:  and especially if the composition be in verse; for then it comes more avowedly in the shape of a work of art; and of course, is more likely to be coloured by the work of art holden in most esteem at the time.  In a bulky volume of Poetry entitled ELEGANT EXTRACTS IN VERSE, which must be known to most of my Readers, as it is circulated everywhere and in fact constitutes at this day the poetical library of our Schools, I find a number of epitaphs in verse, of the last century; and there is scarcely one which is not thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have over-run our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope.  Energy,