id constitution of his feelings, or for his deficiency in
judgment? A fault of the same kind, though less in degree, is found in
the epitaph of Pope upon Harcourt; of whom it is said that 'he never
gave his father grief but when he died.' I need not point out how many
situations there are in which such an expression of feeling would be
natural and becoming; but in a permanent inscription things only should
be admitted that have an enduring place in the mind; and a nice
selection is required even among these. The Duke of Ormond said of his
son Ossory, 'that he preferred his dead son to any living son in
Christendom,'--a thought which (to adopt an expression used before) has
the infinitude of truth! But though in this there is no momentary
illusion, nothing fugitive, it would still have been unbecoming, had it
been placed in open view over the son's grave; inasmuch as such
expression of it would have had an ostentatious air, and would have
implied a disparagement of others. The sublimity of the sentiment
consists in its being the secret possession of the Father.

Having been engaged so long in the ungracious office of sitting in
judgment where I have found so much more to censure than to approve,
though, wherever it was in my power, I have placed good by the side of
evil, that the Reader might intuitively receive the truths which I
wished to communicate, I now turn back with pleasure to Chiabrera; of
whose productions in this department the Reader of the _Friend_ may be
enabled to form a judgment who has attentively perused the few specimens
only which have been given. 'An epitaph,' says Weever, 'is a
superscription (either in verse or prose) or an astrict pithic diagram,
writ, carved, or engraven upon the tomb, grave, or sepulchre of the
defunct, briefly declaring (_and that with a kind of commiseration_) the
name, the age, the deserts, the dignities, the state, _the praises both
of body and minde_, the good and bad fortunes in the life, and the
manner and time of the death of the person therein interred.' This
account of an epitaph, which as far as it goes is just, was no doubt
taken by Weever from the monuments of our own country, and it shews that
in his conception an epitaph was not to be an abstract character of the
deceased but an epitomized biography blended with description by which
an impression of the character was to be conveyed. Bring forward the one
incidental expression, a kind of commiseration, unite with i