"Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O that the earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."

So muses and speculates Hamlet, on the theme of "to what base uses we may return, Horatio," when his imagination. traces the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole. 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so, Horatio may object. Not a jot, is Hamlet's answer to the objection; for look you, Alexander died, was buried, was resolved into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam. "And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?" Quod erat demonstrandum.

The Prince of Denmark was in the like mood when, in other company, he talked, to the same purpose, of how a man may fish with the worm* that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

Well may Juvenal bid the meditative moralist, expende Annibalem, and expound the text that Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum corpuscula. But it needs a Shakspeare to reduce these to their lowest terms, in the style of Hamlet with imperious Cæsar,-a reductis ad absurdum indeed.

Sydney Smith somewhere girds at the idea of doctrinaire legislators making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades, "and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to brocoli, and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus." Hawthorne once designed a symbolical tale of a young man being slain and buried in the flower garden of his betrothed, and the earth levelled over him. That particular spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers, produces them of admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume; and thus the classic fantasy is realized, of dead people transformed to flowers.

In the book called "God's Acre; or, Historical Notices relating to Churchyards," there is a loathsome story of a Mr. Thompson, of Worcester, who baited his angling-hook with part of the corrupted form of King John, and carried the fish he caught with it in triumph through the streets.

Sir Thomas Browne-how pregnant his hints are !-touches on Mummy as having become merchandize: Mizraim curing wounds, and Pharaoh being sold for balsams.

The heroic dust, as Chateaubriand calls it, of the heart of Duguesclin, stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded up by a glazier to mix his paints. So again we read of the slaughtered hosts during the retreat from Moscow: "Some industrial companies have transported themselves into the desert with their furnaces and their caldrons; the bones have been converted into animal black; whether it come from the dog or from the man, the varnish is equally valuable, and is as brilliant when drawn from obscurity as from glory." Cornelia Knight mentions a Parmese canon, who one day, while the French were in occupation of Piacenza, found the church in possession of three surgeons, or surgeons' mates, of that army, "busily skinning" the dead body of a French soldier. "Horrified at the sight, he asked the meaning of this ghastly proceeding, and was told that some scientific men had discovered that the human skin made excellent leather," and that it had been therefore ordered that all dead bodies should be skinned, for the purpose of providing boots and shoes for the soldiers. Ziska's skin-deep drumdestiny was at least a seeming nobler, if not essentially a more useful one.

Xenophon makes his pattern-prince desirous of having his body turned to beneficial uses after death, by being incorporated with mother earth; positively enjoining his sons not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but to bury it in the ground as soon as the life was gone out of it. Little would trouble him the anticipated contingency of such a peut-être as Burns surmises, in the case of a recently deceased acquaintance -like Xenophon, a sportsman to the core :

"There low he lies, in lasting rest;
Perhaps, upon his mould'ring breast
Some spitefu' moorfowl bigs her nest,
To hatch and breed."

Cyrus, like the essentially practical statesman in Mrs. Gore's

tale, would presumably have detected no irony in Hamlet's assignment of purpose to the ashes of imperious Cæsar: "It seemed a relief to his mind that emperors, when turned to clay, could be turned to account." No more objection to that, than to such a circumstance as "The Traveller" deplores, that

"in those domes where Cæsar once bore sway,
Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,

There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”

Have we not heard Liebig indignantly complain of our importing immense quantities of bones from abroad, thereby draining the fair foreign fields of their very life-blood-scouring as we are said to do foreign battle-plains, that the bony reliques of warriors who fought a good fight in their day, may now be of further avail to make our bread? An English satirist of German sentimentalism pictures a contemplative young Teuton, at dinner time, pausing over his sauer kraut, as he calls to mind that the churchyard wherein his ancestor was decently deposited, has been converted into a kitchen garden; and the conviction flashes upon him that what was a distinguished man is now on the table in the form of cabbage.

Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a "practical suggestion" as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the interest of humanity, "the honour of the dead should be abolished," and all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones contained in them may "supply to plants the power of creating fresh men"?

It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey's letters from the East that mention is made of the writer's seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people

busily engaged in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one's skeleton for thousands of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a gigot that consists in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.

That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints, of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new ramparts. "Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”

Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his bones for jewels? But telle est la vie-or rather, in such a connection, la mort.

The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare's anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact of Swift's larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the purloiner in America, of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about Pope's skull, and of Mathews's thigh-bone circulating from house to house.

Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes post mortem with the

text with which we started, of Jezebel's scattered remains on the face of the field, we call to mind Ben Jonson's description (only too historically true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; "these fingers, and these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart.

"The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus,
And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world,
Now torn and scatter'd, as he needs no grave;
Each little dust covers a little part;

So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried."

VULGAR

"CONSIDER THE LILIES.”

ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.

utilitarianism-for there is a vulgar and shallow phase of it, as well as a scientific and a misrepresented one-can surely find little to its fancy (but then it has no fancy) the invitation, or monition, even though uttered in the Sermon on the Mount, of "Consider the lilies." Why consider them, it would fain object, seeing that they toil not, neither do they spin? But that is the very reason for considering them. They are clothed from above with surpassing beauty, without taking thought for themselves; so clothed, not for utilitarian ends, except in the large sense that the dulce too is utile, that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever; and that is undeniably to be of some "use" in the world.

Herein lies the simple answer to the query in the laureate's poem,

"Oh, to what uses shall we put the wildweed flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose?
But any man that walks the mead, in bud, or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead, a meaning suited to his mind."