g ceremonies of
bravery in the infamy of his nature....

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small
fire sufficeth for life; great flames seemed too little after death,
while men vainly affected pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus. But the
wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced
undoing fires into the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so
mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn....

While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined them;
and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge
their graves; wherein Alaricus seems more subtle, who had a river turned
to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla, who thought himself safe in
his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his
monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with
men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next; who
when they die make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with
that poetical taunt of Isaiah.

Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vainglory and
wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous
resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride
and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible
perpetuity unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be
poorly seen in angles of contingency.

Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made
little more of this world than the world that was before it, while they
lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night of their forebeings.
And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian
annihilation, ecstasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the
kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine
shadow, they have already had a handsome anticipation of heaven; the
glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.

FROM 'A FRAGMENT ON MUMMIES'

Wise Egypt, prodigal of her embalmments, wrapped up her princes and
great commanders in aromatical folds, and, studiously extracting from
corruptible bodies their corruption, ambitiously looked forward to
immortality; from which vainglory we have become acquainted with many
remnants of the old world, who could discourse unto us of the great
things of yore, and tell us strange tales of the sons of M