whilst standing by the
new-made grave, what folly has tempted you into writing an epitaph or a
funeral sermon? The good ought certainly to predominate in both, and in
the epitaph nothing _but_ the good, because were it only for a reason
suggested by Wordsworth, viz., the elaborate and everlasting character
of a record chiselled out painfully in each separate letter, it would be
scandalous to confer so durable an existence in stone or marble upon
trivial human infirmities, such as do not enter into the last solemn
reckoning with the world beyond the grave; whilst, on the other hand,
all graver offences are hushed into 'dread repose,' and, where they
happen to be too atrocious or too memorable, are at once a sufficient
argument for never having undertaken any such memorial. These
considerations privilege the epitaph as sacred to charity, and tabooed
against the revelations of candour. The epitaph cannot open its scanty
records to any breathing or insinuation of infirmity. But the Funeral
Sermon, though sharing in the same general temper of indulgence towards
the errors of the deceased person, might advantageously be laid open to
a far more liberal discussion of those personal or intellectual
weaknesses which may have thwarted the influence of character otherwise
eminently Christian. The _Oraison Funebre_ of the French proposes to
itself by its original model, which must be sought in the _Epideictic_
or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively
eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything _not_
meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual
out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age,
from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the
successions of the biographical detail, are but slightly traced, no
farther, in fact, than is requisite to the intelligibility of the
praises. Whereas, in the English Funeral Sermon, there is no principle
of absolute exclusion operating against the minutest circumstantiations
of fact which can tend to any useful purpose of illustrating the
character. And what is too much for the scale of a sermon literally
preached before a congregation, or modelled to counterfeit such a mode
of address, may easily find its place in the explanatory notes. This is
no romance, or ideal sketch of what might be. It is, and it has been.
There are persons of memorable interest in past times, of whom all tha