snort the
fresh aires, with exceeding great delight, when suddenly there
crosses me a procession, sad, heavy, dolourous, tristfull,
melancholick, able to change mirth into dolour, and overcast a
clearer atmosphere than possibly the neighbourhoods of so great a
citty can afford. An old man, a poore man deceased, is borne on men's
shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemnities of hearse,
mourners, plumes, _mutae personae, those personate actors that will
weep if yee shew them a piece of silver;_ none of those customed
civilities of children, kinsfolk, _dependants_, following the coffin;
he died a poore man, his friends _accessores opum_, _those cronies of
his that stuck by him so long as he had a penny_, now leave him,
forsake him, shun him, desert him; they think it much to follow his
putrid and stinking carcase to the grave; his children, if he had
any, for commonly the case stands thus, this poore man his son dies
before him, he survives, poore, indigent, base, dejected, miserable,
&c., or if he have any which survive him, _sua negotia agunt_, they
mind their own business, forsooth, cannot, will not, find time,
leisure, _inclination, extremum munus perficere_, to follow to the
pit their old indulgent father, which loved them, stroked them,
caressed them, cockering them up, _quantum potuit_, as farre as his
means extended, while they were babes, chits, _minims_, hee may rot
in his grave, lie stinking in the sun _for them_, have no buriall at
all, they care not. _O nefas!_ Chiefly I noted the coffin to have
been _without a pall_, nothing but a few planks, of cheapest wood
that could be had, _naked_, having none of the ordinary _symptomata_
of a funerall, those _locularii_ which bare the body having on
diversely coloured coats, _and none black:_ (one of these reported
the deceased to have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper,
harboured and fed in the workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to
whose proper burying-ground he was now going for interment.) All
which when I behelde, hardly I refrained from weeping, and
incontinently I fell to musing: "If this man had been rich, a
_Croesus_, a _Crassus_, _or as rich as Whittington_, what pompe,
charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall,
_ceremoniall-obsequies_, _obsequious ceremonies_, had been thought
too good for such an one; what store of panegyricks, elogies, funeral
orations, &c., some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his
ill rimes, crying him up, h