to govern or abate many other affections and passions to which our frail
nature is, and ought in various degrees, to be subject. In fact, the
Author appears to have had no precise notion of his own meaning. If she
was 'good without pretence,' it seems unnecessary to say that she was
not proud. Dr. Johnson, making an exception of the verse, 'Convinced
that virtue only is our own,' praises this epitaph for 'containing
nothing taken from common places.' Now in fact, as may be deduced from
the principles of this discourse, it is not only no fault but a primary
requisite in an epitaph that it shall contain thoughts and feelings
which are in their substance common-place, and even trite. It is
grounded upon the universal intellectual property of man,--sensations
which all men have felt and feel in some degree daily and
hourly;--truths whose very interest and importance have caused them to
be unattended to, as things which could take care of themselves. But it
is required that these truths should be instinctively ejaculated or
should rise irresistibly from circumstances; in a word that they should
be uttered in such connection as shall make it felt that they are not
adopted, not spoken by rote, but perceived in their whole compass with
the freshness and clearness of an original intuition. The Writer must
introduce the truth with such accompaniment as shall imply that he has
mounted to the sources of things, penetrated the dark cavern from which
the river that murmurs in every one's ear has flowed from generation to
generation. The line 'Virtue only is our own,'--is objectionable, not
from the common-placeness of the truth, but from the vapid manner in
which it is conveyed. A similar sentiment is expressed with appropriate
dignity in an epitaph by Chiabrera, where he makes the Archbishop of
Albino say of himself, that he was

--smitten by the great ones of the world,
But did not fall; for virtue braves all shocks,
Upon herself resting immoveably.

'So firm yet soft, so strong yet so refined': These intellectual
operations (while they can be conceived of as operations of intellect
at all, for in fact one half of the process is mechanical, words doing
their own work and one half of the line manufacturing the rest) remind
me of the motions of a Posture-master, or of a man balancing a sword
upon his finger, which must be kept from falling at all hazards. 'The
saint sustained it, but the woman died.' Let us lo