y shovel-full of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or
skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth that some time or
other had a place in the composition of an human body. Upon this I began
to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay
confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men
and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and
prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in
the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age,
weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous
heap of matter. After having thus surveyed this great magazine of
mortality, as it were in the lump; I examined it more particularly by
the accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are raised
in every quarter of that ancient fabrick. Some of them were covered with
such extravagant epitaphs, that if it were possible for the dead person
to be acquainted with them, he would blush at the praises which his
friends have bestowed upon him. There are others so excessively modest,
that they deliver the character of the person departed in _Greek_ or
_Hebrew_, and by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In
the poetical quarter, I found there were poets who had no monuments, and
monuments which had no poets. I observed indeed that the present war had
filled the church with many of these uninhabited monuments, which had
been erected to the memory of persons whose bodies were buried in the
plains of _Blenheim_, or in the bosom of the ocean. I could not but be
very much delighted with several modern epitaphs, which are written with
great elegance of expression and justness of thought, and therefore do
honour to the living as well as to the dead. As a foreigner is very apt
to conceive an idea of the ignorance or politeness of a nation from the
turn of their public monuments and inscriptions, they should be
submitted to the perusal of men of learning and genius before they are
put in execution. Sir_Cloudesly Shovel's_ monument has very often given
me great offence: instead of the brave rough _English_ admiral, which
was the distinguishing character of that plain gallant man, he is
represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long
periwig, and reposing himself upon velvet cushions under a canopy of
state. The inscription is answerable to the monument; for, instead of
celebrating