ed the English Fenelon. Johnson calls him the Raphael of essay
writers. The imposing and commanding attitude of the statue erected a
few years since in the Poets' Corner, seems to have arisen, and to have
been devoted to his memory, from his _Reflections on the Tombs in the
Abbey_. Those reflections I here subjoin; and I am sure my reader will
agree with me, that I could not offer a purer honour to his genius and
memory:--"No.26, Friday, March 30.

_Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
Regumque turres, O beate sexti.
Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam,
Jam te premet nox, fabulaeque manes,
Et domus exilis Plutonia._--HOR.

With equal foot, rich friend, impartial fate
Knocks at the cottage, and the palace gate:
Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares,
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy tender years:
Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go
To storied ghosts, and _Pluto's_ house below.--CREECH.

"When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in
Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to
which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the
condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a
kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.
I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the church-yard, the cloisters,
and the church, amusing myself with the tomb-stones and inscriptions
that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them
recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon
one day and died upon another: the whole history of his life being
comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind.
I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass
or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left
no other memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died.
They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of
heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason
but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being
knocked on the head.

_Glaucumque, Medontaque, Thersilochumque._--VIRG.

"The life of these men is finely described in holy writ by _the path of
an arrow_, which is immediately closed up and lost. Upon my going into
the church, I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in
ever