Till time shall every grief remove,
With life, with meaning, and with love.

I have been speaking of faults which are aggravated by temptations
thrown in the way of modern Writers when they compose in metre. The
first six lines of this epitaph are vague and languid, more so than 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 morb