d
his friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died very gradually
after about a fortnight, his last words being, not in distress or
anguish, but as it would seem in visionary rapture: "I were miserable
if I might not die." All this fortnight and to the moment of
his death, the terrible life-sized portrait of himself in his
winding-sheet stood near his bedside, where it could be the "hourly
object" of his attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of the
seventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if the most eccentric,
of its lyrical poets passed away in the very pomp of death, on the
31st of March, 1631.

There was something eminently calculated to arrest and move the
imagination in such an end as this, and people were eager to read the
discourse which the "sacred authority" of his Majesty himself had
styled the Dean's funeral sermon. It was therefore printed in 1632. As
sermons of the period go it is not long, yet it takes a full hour to
read it slowly aloud, and we may thus estimate the strain which it
must have given to the worn-out voice and body of the Dean to deliver
it. The present writer once heard a very eminent Churchman, who was
also a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age of ninety. This
was the Danish bishop Grundtvig. In that case the effort of speaking,
the extraction, as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from the
shrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten minutes. But the
English divines of the Jacobean age, like their Scottish brethren of
to-day, were accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from their
very diaconate.

The sermon is one of the most "creepy" fragments of theological
literature it would be easy to find. It takes as its text the words
from the sixty-eighth Psalm: "And unto God the Lord belong the issues
of death." In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adorned
with fine similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a
king might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physical
horror and no ghostly terror of the great crisis which he was himself
to be the first to pass through. "That which we call life," he says,
and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, "is but
_Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our
life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end.
Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth
and rest die in age, and age also dies