d funeral Soroi of the
Strangers are to be seen. The bright verdure and the bright marbles, the
classical purity of the monuments, the desert air, the austere solemnity
of every thing about me, came with new force upon my imagination. I
walked slowly amongst the tombs, and tried to decipher the inscriptions.
The dead are of various nations,--English, American, but principally
German. Sometimes a cluster of cypresses shadowed the tomb--sometimes a
fair flowering shrub had twined around it. The epitaphs were written
with elegance always; at times with the deepest tenderness and beauty.
Each had his short history, each his melancholy interest and adventure.
Here was the man of science and literature, who came to lay down his
head, after a painful and varied pilgrimage, in this City of the Soul. A
Humboldt was buried here; a Thorwalsden yet may. Here reposes clay too
finely tempered for the unkindnesses of mankind--Keats lies near;--a
little farther is one who, on the point of quitting Rome to rejoin an
affectionate family after a too long absence, full of the anticipations
of the traveller and of youth, is thrown from his carriage at a mile's
distance from the city, and never quits Rome more;--beside him is an
only child, whom the sun of Italy could not save;--and next, one who
perished suddenly, like Miss Bathurst, in the very bud and bloom of
existence,--or another, who died away, day after day, in the embraces of
her parents, and now rests in the midst of the beautiful in vain. The
graceful lines of Petrarch are inscribed on the sarcophagus--they are
full of feeling and the country, and make one pause and dream:--

"Non come fiamma, che per forza e spenta,
Ma che per se medesma si consuma,
Se n'ando in pace, l'anima contenta."

No epitaph could be better. _New Monthly Magazine._

* * * * *

QUACKS

Have nearly the same interest as knaves in concealing their ignorance
and frauds, and for the most part regard with the same fear and
detestation the instrument which unmasks their pretensions. This must be
understood with some qualification, because the exposure of ignorance
and fraud is not always sufficient to open the eyes, and enlighten the
understandings, of mankind. Some perverse dupes are not to be reasoned
out of their infatuation; they had rather hug the impostor, than confess
the cheat; and quacks, speculating upon this infirmity of human nature,
will sometimes court eve