isputes,--I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the
little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. And, when I read
the several dates on the tombs of some that died yesterday and some 600
years ago, I consider that Great Day when we shall all of us be
contemporaries, and make our appearance together."

Our third humourist comes to speak upon the same subject. You will have
observed in the previous extracts the characteristic humour of each
writer--the subject and the contrast--the fact of Death, and the play of
individual thought, by which each comments on it, and now hear the third
writer--death, sorrow, and the grave, being for the moment also his theme.
"The first sense of sorrow I ever knew," Steele says in the _Tatler_, "was
upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of
age: but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed of
a real understanding why nobody would play with us. I remember I went into
the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had
my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa;
for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there. My
mother caught me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the
silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces,
and told me in a flood of tears, 'Papa could not hear me, and would play
with me no more: for they were going to put him under ground, whence he
would never come to us again.' She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble
spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of
her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that,
before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has
made pity the weakness of my heart ever since."

Can there be three more characteristic moods of minds and men? "Fools, do
you know anything of this mystery?" says Swift, stamping on a grave and
carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. "Miserable, purblind
wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how
can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless
heaven?" Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much
the same sentiment: and speaks of the rivalry of wits, and the contests of
holy men, with the same sceptic placidity. "Look what a little vain dust
we are;" he says, smiling over the tombstones, and cat