itaph. I am almost afraid to
say it, but I never could admire the line,

"Lies the subject of all verse,"

nor the idea of Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart
at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me about the
equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac's monument to Mrs.
Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,--poor conceits both of them, without
the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the
rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from feeling that we are
standing by the resting-place of one who was

"learn'd and fair and good"

enough to stir the soul of stalwart Ben Jonson, and the names of Sidney
and Herbert make us forget the strange hyperboles.

History meets us everywhere, as we stray among these ancient monuments.
Under that effigy lie the great bones of Sir John Cheyne, a mighty man
of war, said to have been "overthrown" by Richard the Third at the
battle of Bosworth Field. What was left of him was unearthed in 1789 in
the demolition of the Beauchamp chapel, and his thigh-bone was found to
be four inches longer than that of a man of common stature.

The reader may remember how my recollections started from their
hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of
Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which
we were driving. I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meeting with
the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the
end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of
Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the
well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period.
The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than
those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No
title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of
"Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine," a
province with "Gorgeana" (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its
capital. Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting
with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a
graft from an old tree on a new stock. I could not keep down the
associations called up by the name of Gorges. There is a certain
pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with
the holy water of a high-sounding title; not that a "Sir" before a man's
name m