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 one 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 every shovelful of it that was thrown up, the
fragment of a bone or skull intermixt with a kind of fresh moldering
earth that some time or other had a place in the composition of a
human body. Upon this I began to consider with myself, what
innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the
pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and
enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled
amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how
beauty, strength and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity, lay
undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.

And having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality, as it were
in the lump, I examined it more particularly by the accounts which I
found on several of the monuments which are raised in every quarter of
that ancient fabric. Some of them were covered with such extravagant
epitaphs, that, if it were possible for the dead person to be
acquainted with them, he would blush at the praises which his friends
have bestowed upon him. There are others so excessively modest, that
they deliver the character of the person departed in Greek or Hebrew,
and by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In the
poetical quarter, I found there were poets who had no monuments, and
monuments which had no poets. I observed, indeed, that the present war
had filled the church with many of these uninhabited monuments, which
had been erected to the memory of persons whose bodies were perhaps
buried in the plains of Blenheim, or in the bosom of the ocean.

I could not but be very much delighted with several modern epitaphs,
which are written with great elegance of expression and justness of
thought, and therefore do honor to the living as well as to the dead.
As a foreigner is very a