I think would have been possible had it been written in prose.  Yet Gray, who was so happy in the remaining part, especially the last four lines, has grievously failed in prose upon a subject which it might have been expected would have bound him indissolubly to the propriety of Nature and comprehensive reason.  I allude to the conclusion of the epitaph upon his mother, where he says, ’she was the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.’  This is a searching thought, but wholly out of place.  Had it been said of an idiot, of a palsied child, or of an adult from any cause dependent upon his mother to a degree of helplessness which nothing but maternal tenderness and watchfulness could answer, that he had the misfortune to survive his mother, the thought would have been just.  The same might also have been wrung from any man (thinking of himself) when his soul was smitten with compunction or remorse, through the consciousness of a misdeed from which he might have been preserved (as he hopes or believes) by his mother’s prudence, by her anxious care if longer continued, or by the reverential fear of offending or disobeying her.  But even then (unless accompanied with a detail of extraordinary circumstances), if transferred to her monument, it would have been misplaced, as being too peculiar, and for reasons which have been before alleged, namely, as too transitory and poignant.  But in an ordinary case, for a man permanently and conspicuously to record that this was his fixed feeling; what is it but to run counter to the course of nature, which has made it matter of expectation and congratulation that parents should die before their children?  What is it, if searched to the bottom, but lurking and sickly selfishness?  Does not the regret include a wish that the mother should have survived all her offspring, have witnessed that bitter desolation where the order of things is disturbed and inverted?  And finally, does it not withdraw the attention of the Reader from the subject to the Author of the Memorial, as one to be commiserated for his strangely unhappy condition, or to be condemned for the morbid constitution of his feelings, or for his deficiency in judgment?  A fault of the same kind, though less in degree, is found in the epitaph of Pope upon Harcourt; of whom it is said that ’he never gave his father grief but when he died.’  I need not point out how many situations there are in which such an expression of feeling would be natural and becoming; but in a permanent inscription things only should be admitted that have an enduring place in the mind; and a nice selection is required even among these.  The Duke of Ormond said of his son Ossory, ’that he preferred his dead son to any living son in Christendom,’—­a thought which (to adopt an expression used before) has the infinitude of truth!  But though in this there is no momentary illusion, nothing fugitive, it would still have been unbecoming, had it been placed in open view over the son’s grave; inasmuch as such expression of it would have had an ostentatious air, and would have implied a disparagement of others.  The sublimity of the sentiment consists in its being the secret possession of the Father.