One summer's eve, when the breeze was gone,

The hairs on his brow were silver-white,

Some lie beneath the churchyard stone,

And some before the speaker.

I remember, I remember

How my childhood fleeted by, —

The mirth of its December,

Ibid.

And the warmth of its July.

I remember, I remember.

CLARKE. - SEWARD. - GREENE.

519

MACDONALD CLARKE.

1792-1842.

Whilst Twilight's curtain, gathering far,

Is pinned with a single diamond star.1 Death in Disguise.

Old Grimes is dead, that good old man,

We ne'er shall see him more;

He used to wear a long black coat,

All buttoned down before.2

Old Grimes.

1 Mrs. Child says "he thus describes the closing day": Now twilight lets her curtain down,

And pins it with a star.

Letters from New York, First Series, p. 92.

2 John Lee is dead, that good old man,

We ne'er shall see him more;

He used to wear an old drab coat,

All buttoned down before.

"To the Memory of John Lee, who died May 21st, 1823."

An inscription in Matherne churchyard.

Old Abram Brown is dead and gone,

You'll never see him more;

He used to wear a long brown coat

That buttoned down before.

Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, p. 60.

THOMAS B. MACAULAY. 1800-1859.

Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain, wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

Essay on Mitford's History of Greece. Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. Essay on Milton.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked. On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

Ibid.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

Ibid.

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! On Boswell's Life of Johnson.

I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

Letter to Macvey Napier, Dec. 17, 1830.

She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.1 Review of Ranke's History of the Popes.

The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
On Warren Hastings.

1 The same image was employed by Macaulay in 1824, in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Greece; and he repeated it in his review of Mill's Essay on Government, in 1829.

....

What cities, as great as this, have . . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others. . . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins. -Goldsmith, The Bee, No. iv. (1759), A City Night Piece.

Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?— Volney's Ruins, Ch. ii.

At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra. - Horace Walpole, Letter to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774. Where now is Britain ?

Even as the savage sits upon the stone

That marks where stood her capitols, and hears

The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks

From the dismaying solitude.-Henry Kirke White, Time. In the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians.Shelley, Dedication to Peter Bell.

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall. On Warren Hastings.

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.

Frederic the Great.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

Ibid.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.1

History of England. Vol. i. Ch. 1. There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen. Vol. i. Ch. 2.

2

The Puritans hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.3 Vol. i. Ch. 3.

1 Compare Fielding. Page 308.

2 I have read their platform; but I see nothing in it both new and valuable. "What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable." Daniel Webster, Speech, March, 1848.

If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles.-Vit. anon. Plumptre, p. lxiv.

3 Even bearbaiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian; the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence. - Hume, History of England, Vol. i. Ch. 62.