ON DEATH AND BURIAL.

HE cultivation of pleasant associations is, next to health, the great secret of enjoyment; and

accordingly, as we lessen our cares and increase our pleasures, we may imagine ourselves affording a grateful spectacle to the Author of happiness. Error and misery, taken in their proportion, are the exceptions in his system. The world is most unquestionably happier, upon the whole, than otherwise; or light and air, and the face of Nature, would be different from what they are, and mankind no longer be buoyed up in perpetual hope and action. By cultivating agreeable thoughts, then, we tend, like bodies in philosophy, to the greater mass of sensations, rather than the less.

What we can enjoy, let us enjoy like creatures made for that very purpose: what we cannot, let us, in the same character, do our best to deprive of its bitterness. Nothing can be more idle than the voluntary gloom with which people think to please Heaven in certain matters, and which they confound with serious acknowledgment, or with what they call a due sense of its dispensations. It is nothing but the cultivation of the principle of fear, instead of confidence, with whatever name they may disguise it. It is carrying frightened faces to court, instead of glad and grateful ones;

and is above all measure ridiculous, because the real cause of it, and, by the way, of a thousand other feelings which religious courtiers mistake for religion, cannot be concealed from the Being it is intended to honor. There is a dignity certainly in suffering well, where we cannot choose but suffer; if we must take physic, let us do it like men: but what would be his dignity, who, when he had the choice in his power, should make the physic bitterer than it is, or even to refuse to render it more palatable, purely to look grave over it, and do honor to the physician?

The idea of our dissolution is one of those which we most abuse in this manner, principally, no doubt, because it is abhorrent from the strong principle of vitality implanted in us, and the habits that have grown up with it. But what then? So much the more should we divest it of all the unpleasant associations which it need not excite, and add to it all the pleasant ones which it will allow.

But what is the course we pursue? We remember having a strong impression, years ago, of the absurdity of our mode of treating a death-bed, and of the great desirableness of having it considered as nothing but a sick one, one to be smoothed and comforted, even by cordial helps, if necessary. We remember also how some persons, who, nevertheless, did too much justice to the very freest of our speculations to consider them as profane, were startled by this opinion, till we found it expressed, in almost so many words, by no less an authority than Lord Bacon. We got at our notion through a very different process, no doubt,he through the depth of his knowledge, and we from

the very buoyancy of our youth; but we are not disposed to think it the less wise on that account. "The serious," of course, are bound to be shocked at so cheering a proposition; but of them we have already spoken. The great objection would be, that such a system would deprive the evil-disposed of one terror in prospect, and that this principle of determent is already found too feeble to afford any diminution. The fact is, the whole principle is worth little or nothing, unless the penalty to be inflicted is pretty certain, and appeals also to the less sentimental part of our nature. It is good habits, a well-educated conscience, a little early knowledge, the cultivation of generous motives, must supply people with preventives of bad conduct: their sense of things is too immediate and lively to attend, in the long-run, to any thing else. We will be bound to say, generally speaking, that the prospective terrors of a death-bed never influenced any others than nervous consciences, too weak, and inhabiting organizations too delicate, to afford to be very bad ones. But, in the mean time, they may be very alarming to such consciences in prospect, and very painful to the best and most temperate of mankind in actual sufferance; and why should this be, but, as we have said before, to keep bitter that which we could sweeten, and to persist in a mistaken want of relief, under a notion of its being a due sense of our condition? We know well enough what a due sense of our condition is in other cases of infirmity; and what is a death-bed but the very acme of infirmity, -the sickness, bodily and mental, that, of all others, has most need of relief?

If the death happens to be an easy one, the case is altered; and no doubt it is oftener so than people imagine: but how much pains are often taken to render it difficult! First, the chamber in which the dying person lies is made as gloomy as possible with curtains and vials and nurses and terrible whispers, and perhaps the continual application of handkerchiefs to weeping eyes; then, whether he wishes it or not, or is fit to receive it or not, he is to have the whole truth told him by some busy-body who never was so anxious, perhaps, in the cause of veracity before ; and lastly come partings, and family assemblings, and confusion of the head with matters of faith, and trembling prayers, that tend to force upon dying weakness the very doubts they undertake to dissipate. Well may the soldier take advantage of such deathbeds as these to boast of the end that awaits him in the field.

But, having lost our friend, we must still continue to add to our own misery at the circumstance. We must heap about the recollection of our loss all the most gloomy and distasteful circumstances we can contrive, and thus, perhaps, absolutely incline ourselves to think as little of him as possible. We wrap the body in ghastly habiliments; put it in as tasteless a piece of furniture as we can invent; dress ourselves in the gloomiest of colors; awake the barbarous monotony of the church-bell (to frighten every sick person in the neighborhood); call about us a set of officious mechanics of all sorts, who are counting their shillings, as it were, by the tears that we shed, and watching with jealousy every candle's end of their

"perquisites;" and proceed to consign our friend or relation to the dust, under a ceremony that takes particular pains to impress that consummation on our minds. Lastly come tasteless tombstones and ridiculous epitaphs, with perhaps a skull and cross-bones at top; and the tombstones are crowded together, generally in the middle of towns, always near the places of worship, unless the church-yard is overstocked. Scarcely ever is there a tree on the spot: in some remote villages alone are the graves ever decorated with flowers.* All is stony, earthy, and dreary. It seems as if, after having rendered every thing before death as painful as possible, we endeavored to subside into a sullen indifference, which contradicted itself by its own efforts.

The Greeks managed these things better. It is curious that we, who boast so much of our knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and of the glad hopes. of an after-life, should take such pains to make the image of death melancholy; while, on the other hand, Gentiles whom we treat with so much contempt for their ignorance on those heads should do the reverse, and associate it with emblems that ought to belong rather to us. But the truth is, that we know very little what we are talking about, when we speak, in the gross, of the ancients, and of their ideas of Deity and humanity. The very finest and most amiable part of our notions on those subjects comes originally from their philosophers: all the rest.— the gloom, the bad passions, the favoritism are the work of other

* Matters have been improving since this article was written.