Book of Kings (xix. 35). The ancient
Egyptians, too, in whose strange system of symbolism may be found the
germ, at least, of most of the types used in the religion and the arts
of more modern nations, had no representation of Death as an individual
agent. They expressed the extinction of life very naturally and simply
by the figure of a mummy. Such a figure it was their custom to pass
round among the guests at their feasts; and the Greeks and Romans
imitated them, with slight modifications, in the form of the image and
the manner of the ceremony. Some scholars have found in this custom a
deep moral and religious significance, akin to that which certainly
attached to the custom of placing a slave in the chariot of a Roman
conquering general to say to him at intervals, as his triumphal
procession moved with pomp and splendor through the swarming streets,
"Remember that thou art a man." But this is too subtile a conjecture.
The ceremony was but a silent way of saying, "Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes but too plain,
must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise
not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the
Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the full this
philosophy:--

"Ce que j'ai mange,
Ce que j'ai bu,
Ce que j'ai dissipe,
Je l'ai maintenant avec moi.
Ce que j'ai laisse,
Je l'ai perdu,"

What I ate,
What I drank,
What I dissipated,
I have with me.
That which I left
I lost.

The figure of the sad youth leaning upon an inverted torch, in which
the Greeks embodied their idea of Death, is familiar to all who have
examined ancient Art. The Etruscan Death was a female, with wings upon
the shoulders, head, and feet, hideous countenance, terrible fangs and
talons, and a black skin. No example of the form attributed to him by
the early Christians has come down to us, that I can discover; but we
know that they, as well as the later Hebrews, considered Death as the
emissary of the Evil One, if not identical with him, and called him
impious, unholy. It was in the Dark Ages, that the figure of a dead body
or a skull was first used as a symbol of Death; but even then its office
appears to have been purely symbolic, and not representative;--that is,
these figures served to remind men of their mortality, or to mark a
place of sepulture, and were not the embod