ourning colours of
black and white became the fashion at court. Watches in the form of
skulls were worn; jewels and pendants in the shape of coffins; and
rings decorated with skulls and skeletons.

[135] My discovery of the nature of this rare volume, of what is
original and what collected, will be found in volume ii. of this
work.

HISTORY OF THE SKELETON OF DEATH.

_Euthanasia! Euthanasia_! an easy death! was the exclamation of
Augustus; it was what Antoninus Pius enjoyed; and it is that for which
every wise man will pray, said Lord Orrery, when perhaps he was
contemplating the close of Swift's life.

The ancients contemplated DEATH without terror, and met it with
indifference. It was the only divinity to which they never sacrificed,
convinced that no human being could turn aside its stroke. They raised
altars to Fever, to Misfortune, to all the evils of life; for these
might change! But though they did not court the presence of death in any
shape, they acknowledged its tranquillity; and in the beautiful fables
of their allegorical religion, Death was the daughter of Night, and the
sister of Sleep; and ever the friend of the unhappy! To the eternal
sleep of death they dedicated their sepulchral monuments--_AEternali
somno!_[136] If the full light of revelation had not yet broken on them,
it can hardly be denied that they had some glimpses and a dawn of the
life to come, from the many allegorical inventions which describe the
transmigration of the soul. A butterfly on the extremity of an
extinguished lamp, held up by the messenger of the gods intently gazing
above, implied a dedication of that soul; Love, with a melancholy air,
his legs crossed, leaning on an inverted torch, the flame thus naturally
extinguishing itself, elegantly denoted the cessation of human life; a
rose sculptured on a sarcophagus, or the emblems of epicurean life
traced on it, in a skull wreathed by a chaplet of flowers, such as they
wore at their convivial meetings, a flask of wine, a patera, and the
small bones used as dice: all these symbols were indirect allusions to
death, veiling its painful recollections. They did not pollute their
imagination with the contents of a charnel-house. The sarcophagi of the
ancients rather recall to us the remembrance of the activity of life;
for they are sculptured with battles or games, in basso relievo; a sort
of tender homage paid to the dead, observes Mad. de Stael, with he