her nations of
antiquity, with whose manners we have nothing to do here. The Romans
indeed had a good reason for this anxiety, for they believed, in
common with the Greeks, that if the body remained unentombed, the soul
wandered for a hundred years on the hither side of the Styx, alone and
desponding, unable to gain admission to its final resting-place,
whether among the happy or the miserable. If, therefore, any person
perished at sea, or otherwise under such circumstances that his body
could not be found, a _cenotaph_, or empty tomb, was erected by his
surviving friends, which served as well for his passport over the
Stygian ferry as if his body had been burnt or committed to the earth
with due ceremonies. Hence it became a religious duty, not rashly to
be neglected, to scatter earth over any unburied body which men
chanced to see, for even so slight a sepulchre as this was held
sufficient to appease the scruples of the infernal gods. The reader,
if there be any readers of Latin to whom these superstitions are
unfamiliar, may refer to the sixth book of the AEneid, line 325, and to
a remarkable ode of Horace, the 28th of the first book, which turns
entirely upon this subject. Burial, therefore, was a matter of
considerable importance.

When death approached, the nearest relative hung over the dying
person, endeavoring to inhale his last breath, in a fond belief that
the _anima_, the living principle, departed at that moment, and by
that passage from the body. Hence the phrases, _animam in primo ore
tenere, spiritum excipere_, and the like. It is curious to observe how
an established form of expression holds its ground. Here are we, after
the lapse of eighteen hundred years, still talking of receiving a
dying friend's last breath, as if we really meant what we say. After
death the body was washed and anointed by persons called
_pollinctores_; then laid out on a bier, the feet to the door, to
typify its approaching departure, dressed in the best attire which it
had formerly owned. The bier was often decked with leaves and flowers,
a simple and touching tribute of affection, which is of the heart, and
speaks to it, and therefore has maintained its ground in every age and
region, unaffected by the constant changes in customs merely arbitrary
and conventional.

[Illustration]

In the early ages of Rome the rites of burial and burning seem to have
been alike in use. Afterwards the former seems (for the matter is not