a common or natural employment of men at
any time. We are not anxious unerringly to understand the constitution
of the minds of those who have soothed, who have cheered, who have
supported us: with whom we have been long and daily pleased or
delighted. The affections are their own justification. The light of love
in our hearts is a satisfactory evidence that there is a body of worth
in the minds of our friends or kindred, whence that light has proceeded.
We shrink from the thought of placing their merits and defects to be
weighed against each other in the nice balance of pure intellect; nor do
we find much temptation to detect the shades by which a good quality or
virtue is discriminated in them from an excellence known by the same
general name as it exists in the mind of another; and, least of all, do
we incline to these refinements when under the pressure of sorrow,
admiration, or regret, or when actuated by any of those feelings which
incite men to prolong the memory of their friends and kindred, by
records placed in the bosom of the all-uniting and equalising receptacle
of the dead.

The first requisite, then, in an Epitaph is, that it should speak, in a
tone which shall sink into the heart, the general language of humanity
as connected with the subject of death--the source from which an epitaph
proceeds--of death, and of life. To be born and to die are the two
points in which all men feel themselves to be in absolute coincidence.
This general language may be uttered so strikingly as to entitle an
epitaph to high praise; yet it cannot lay claim to the highest unless
other excellencies be superadded. Passing through all intermediate
steps, we will attempt to determine at once what these excellencies are,
and wherein consists the perfection of this species of composition.--It
will be found to lie in a due proportion of the common or universal
feeling of humanity to sensations excited by a distinct and clear
conception, conveyed to the reader's mind, of the individual, whose
death is deplored and whose memory is to be preserved; at least of his
character as, after death, it appeared to those who loved him and lament
his loss. The general sympathy ought to be quickened, provoked, and
diversified, by particular thoughts, actions, images,--circumstances of
age, occupation, manner of life, prosperity which the deceased had
known, or adversity to which he had been subject; and these ought to be
bound together and solemnised