Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked out." To quote Chaucer again : "That is to seyn, in youthe or elles in age, He moot ben deed, the kyng as schal a page." Cranmer's transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the end-the strain subsiding into a minor key-by the unwelcome but inevitable reflection, "But she must die." So muses and moralises Talbot again, in another of the historical plays : "But kings and mightiest potentates must die; For that's the end of human misery." And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is nothing left him but his body's length, exclaims, as one that at last feels it feelingly, "Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must." And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury witnessing the death, exclaims, "But now a king —now thus!" the prince who is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork, 66 Even so must I run on, and even so stop." In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian's trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when he thus addresses the frivolous fair of his day : “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most High. But, O gods of flesh and blood, O gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall fall to the ground, veruntamen sicut homines moriemini." This is in Tertullian's description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty. Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir Joshua Reynolds's picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached, Et in Arcadia ego. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: "He saw it yesterday, and said at once, 'Oh, there is a tombstone in the background. Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.'" The thought is said to have been borrowed from Poussin-where some gay revellers stumble over a death's head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ ego. Memorable at Saladin's banquet to Richard and his peers— ever memorable among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, "the banner of Death, with this impressive inscription—Saladin, King of Kings-Saladin, Victor of Victors-Saladin must Die.'" Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the British monarch, to whom he is addressing his carmen seculare for the year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh : "But a relentless destiny Urges all that e'er was born: Snatch'd from her arms, Britannia once must mourn For as Master Matthew puts it in another ode : "Alike must every state and every age Sustain the universal tyrant's rage; For neither William's power nor Mary's charms Wisdom and eloquence in vain would plead "The ancient sage, who did so long maintain With all the births and deaths he had in store Is yet with stores of wilder notions fraught, Too soon convinced, shall yield that fleeting breath The truism appears to have been a favourite theme with Prior, who expatiates upon it in a variety of keys. Here is one other specimen from his stores, in octosyllabic metre:— "All must obey the general doom, Down from Alcides to Tom Thumb. Does not Cervantes begin the last chapter of his great work with the reflection that, as all human things, especially the lives of men, are transitory, ever advancing to their decline and final termination, so "Don Quixote was favoured by no privilege of exemption from the common fate," for the period of his dissolution came when he least thought of it—and he died. Death's final conquest is the subject of a fine poem of James Shirley's; the piece by which he is, in every sense, best remembered. How death lays his icy hands on kings, is there told with pitiless candour; and the merry monarch, par excellence, Charles the Second, is said to have greatly admired the poetry, if not the candour, of Shirley's strain. Early or late, all stoop to fate; that is the trite topic. But the moral is noble, and nobly expressed. The poet reminds laurelled victors that the garlands are withering on their brow, and that soon upon death's purple altar shall the "victor victim" bleed :— "All heads must come To the cold tomb; * John Asgill distinguished himself by maintaining in a treatise now forgotten, that death is no natural necessity, and that to escape it is within the range of the humanly practicable. But Asgill's biography, like every other, has for a last page the inevitable "And he died." Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." The first verse only of George Herbert's "Virtue" is familiar to men; all four have a music and a meaning of their own :"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, "Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave And thou must die. "Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, "Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like seasoned timber, never gives ; T AN ULTRA-PROTESTER. ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 33-35, 69–75. O have written it ultra-Protestant, would mislead into an expectation of polemical matter, offensive to Orangeism, and entirely alien from the purpose. For who is the hyperprotester, not to write it ultra-Protestant, of whom we speak? None other than St. Peter. Nominally the first Pope. But let that pass. Whether technically an ultra-Protestant or not, -let that pass too. It is with his surplusage of protestations, vehemently asserted, and anon ignominiously ignored, that we are at present concerned. Though all men, all, should be offended because of Christ, should stumble and fall because of Him, yet would he never be offended, never stumble, never lose his footing, firm as a rock, firm as his own name, Peter, Cephas; a rock on which the Church was to be built. The protest ofthe apostle won no meed of thanks and assurance of conviction from his Lord. He who needed not that any should testify of man, for He knew what was in man--and knew what was wanting in this man,-waved aside, as absolutely worthless, the perfervid protestations of the impulsive son of Jonas. Thrice should Peter deny Him before dawn of another day. Deny Him? Had it come to that? The protester must become ultra in his protests. "Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee!" It would be beside the mark here to take into account the other voces et præterea nihil, echoing the same thing-protested notes at the best-for likewise also said all the disciples. Peter is their representative man, and ours. Gertrude's comment in "Hamlet," on the accumulated asseverations of the stage-queen, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks," has passed into a proverb. "The more vehemently they assert, the less credit they obtain for sincerity," observes Hartley Coleridge, of some examples of impulsive womankind. Racine's Bérénice turns the tables on Titus in this regard, when she tells him, "Hé quoi! vous me jurez une éternelle ardeur, Pourquoi même du ciel attester la puissance ? Mon cœur ne prétend point, seigneur, vous démentir; How fulsome and hollow, exclaims Marcus Antoninus, does that man look who cries, "I'm resolved to deal clearly with you." Hark you, friend, the philosophic emperor addresses him, “what need of all this flourish? let your actions speak." Mr. Disraeli, in his earliest book, has an eloquent paragraph on "that eagerness of protestation which," in the man charged with criminality, "is a sure sign of crime." There is as much of overacting one's part on the great stage of life, as on the mimic boards; and that with graver issues and a drearier fate. When the subtle and ambitious John of Gischala, pursuing |