Antony. Yet hear me, countrymen; yet hear me speak.

All. Peace, ho! Hear Antony, most noble Antony. Antony. Why, friends, you go to do you know not what.

Wherein hath Cæsar thus deserved your loves?

Alas, you know not!-I must tell you, then.
You have forgot the will I told you of.

All. Most true;-the will!-let's stay, and hear
the will.

Antony. Here is the will, and under Cæsar's seal. To every Roman citizen he gives,

To every several man, seventy-five drachmas.

2 Citizen. Most noble Cæsar!-we'll revenge his death.

3 Citizen. O royal Cæsar!

Antony. Hear me with patience.

All. Peace, ho!

Antony. Moreover, he hath left you all his walks, His private arbors, and new-planted orchards, On this side Tiber; he hath left them you, And to your heirs forever, common pleasures, To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves. Here was a Cæsar! when comes such another? 1 Citizen. Never, never!-Come, away, away! We'll burn his body in the holy place,

And with the brands fire the traitors' houses.

4 Citizen. Pluck down forms, windows, any thing. (Exeunt Citizens, with the body.) Antony. Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.

Take thou what course thou wilt!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

From "Julius Cæsar," Act III., Scene II.

5

WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind 10 with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness that is not disagreeable.

I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I 15 met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common 20 to all mankind.

I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born, and that 25 they died.

They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the head. The life of these men is 5 finely described in holy writ by "the path of an arrow; which is immediately closed up and lost."

Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth, that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body.

10

Upon this I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused to- 15 gether under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and 20 youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of

matter..

After having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality, as it were in the lump, I examined it more 25 particularly, by the accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are raised in every quarter of that ancient fabric. Some of them were covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that, if it were possible for the dead person to be acquainted with them, 30