. The great procession went from the Duke's house in
St. James's Park, through St. James's and the Upper Park to Hyde Park
Corner, and thence through Piccadilly, St. James's Street, Pall Mall,
Charing Cross, and King Street to Westminster Abbey. A small army of
soldiers guarded the remains of the greatest warrior of his age; a whole
heralds' college clustered about the lofty funeral banner on which all
the arms of the Churchills were quartered. Marlborough's friends and
admirers, his old brothers-in-arms, the companions of his victories,
followed his coffin, and listened while Garter King-at-Arms, bending over
the open grave, said: "Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of
this transitory life unto His mercy the most high, most mighty, and most
noble prince, John Churchill, Duke and Earl of Marlborough."

In Applebee's _Weekly Journal_ for Saturday, August 11th, two days after
the funeral, we are told that the Duchess of Marlborough, in honor of the
memory of her life-long lover, had offered a prize of five hundred pounds
for a Latin epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb, and that "several
poets have already taken to their lofty studies to contend for the prize."

At Marlborough's funeral we see for the last time in high public estate
one of the few Englishmen of the day who could properly be named in the
same breath with Marlborough. This was Francis Atterbury, the eloquent
and daring Bishop of Rochester. Atterbury came up to {212} town for the
purpose of officiating at the funeral of the great Duke. On July 30,
1722, he wrote from the country to his friend Pope, announcing his visit
to London. "I go to-morrow," Atterbury writes, "to the Deanery, and I
believe I shall stay there till I have said dust to dust, and shut up
this last scene of pompous vanity." Atterbury does not seem to have been
profoundly impressed with the religious solemnity of the occasion. His
was not a very reverential spirit. There was as little of the temper of
pious sanctity in Atterbury as in Swift himself. The allusion to the
last scene of pompous vanity might have had another significance, as well
as that which Atterbury meant to give to it. Amid the pomp in which
Marlborough's career went out, the career of Atterbury went out as well,
although in a different way, and not closed sublimely by death. After
the funeral, Atterbury went to the Deanery at Westminster--he was Dean of
Westminster as well as Bishop of Rochester--and