and repeat, "Remember, sir, you are a man." A variety of
circumstances occur to us, while we eat, and drink, and submit to the
humiliating necessities of nature, that may well inculcate into us this
salutary lesson. The wonder rather is, that man, who has so many things
to put him in mind to be humble and despise himself, should ever have
been susceptible of pride and disdain. Nebuchadnezzar must indeed have
been the most besotted of mortals, if it were necessary that he should
be driven from among men, and made to eat grass like an ox, to convince
him that he was not the equal of the power that made him.

But fortunately, as I have said, man is a "stranger at home." Were it
not for this, how incomprehensible would be

The ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
The monarch's crown, and the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, and the judge's robe!

How ludicrous would be the long procession and the caparisoned horse,
the gilded chariot and the flowing train, the colours flying, the drums
beating, and the sound of trumpets rending the air, which after all only
introduce to us an ordinary man, no otherwise perhaps distinguished from
the vilest of the ragged spectators, than by the accident of his birth!

But what is of more importance in the temporary oblivion we are enabled
to throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we arrive at the
majesty of man. That sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and
the man of great literary and original endowments "in apprehension like
a God," we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally
to cast away the slough and exuviae of the body from incumbering and
dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of
the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and
gave loftiness to his stature, added a youthful beauty and grace to his
motions, and caused his eyes to flash with more than mortal fire. With
what disdain, when I have been rapt in the loftiest moods of mind, do I
look down upon my limbs, the house of clay that contains me, the gross
flesh and blood of which my frame is composed, and wonder at a lodging,
poorly fitted to entertain so divine a guest!

A still more important chapter in the history of the human mind has its
origin in these considerations. Hence it is that unenlightened man, in
almost all ages and countries, has been induced, independently of
divine revelation, to regard death, the most