strous. Not only, however, is a dead body in this position, it is even placed under another disadvantage. The body is to us the exponent of beauty, genius, will, strength, emotion. It is the very vehicle of life; through whose glances, words, and gestures alone we get any knowledge of the person inhabiting it. We easily, therefore, transfer the idea of vitality to the body itself. Because it is a necessary accident, we forget that it is an accident at all. We identify all its modifications only with itself, as if it were selfinvigorating and self-determining. We invest it with faculties which do not belong to it; and in the first moments of its strange loneliness and divorce from the soul, we are apt to demand something which it was never its function to supply. It occupies the very same space as heretofore; it is in the very attitude, it may be, of vigour and energy, or in the very pose of a boundless latent force; and we go to it for strength, for velition, for recognition. We find it irresponsive and powerless, and it thus appears ridiculous as a pretender and impostor.

The human body does not even put off the grotesque as it puts on corruption. The contrast between its former life and its present dissolved organisms is still apparent. And indeed, because it is a deeper shade to the stronger light than the one we have just mentioned, it has been more often indicated. We may be sure that the tongue of the great Roman satirist saluted his cheek quite as often as his tears blotted his verses, when he celebrated the few ounces of dust* which, for aught he knew, were then blowing about the world or giving ophthalmia to a Bithynian beggar; but which formerly, adhering with moisture and informed with soul, had been named Hannibal, blaster and scaler of the Alps, victor of Cannæ, fear of Rome. There is a sub-presentation of the grotesque in the kindred reflections which the world's dramatist has put into the mouth of Hamlet. And none better than Shakspeare knew of this lurking of the grotesque in *Strictly an ounce and a half. His quot libras is an overstatement.

the very penetralia and intensities of grief; or better understood that this liability to exhibit the grotesque was one of sorrow's crowns of sorrow.' That he has, through scenes so perilous, preserved to Ophelia the angelic beauty of her life, the integrity of her filial piety-which, as a clue of light and love, infallibly threaded the devious mazes of her tangled intellect and, above all, the perfect pathos of her death, without obtruding the grotesque, is one of the scarcely minor marvels of his genius. He was, we are bound to acknowledge, materially assisted by Ophelia's madness, the exceptional laws of which, tolerating and demanding the grotesque, held in abeyance the law of congruity. We believe that there is a grotesque, even here: but we, for our part, shall defer seeking it out until after we have incurred the malison that threatens the disturber of Shakspeare's bones. If the reader wishes to investigate this grotesque, we advise him as a preliminary, to cool his veins with an iceberg; and we warn him that he will pay a lifelong penalty for the analysis.

It was in the spirit of Juvenal and of Hamlet that Francis Beaumont wrote his Rembrandtesque poem 'On the Tombs in Westminster;' and that Landor apostrophized a lock of the calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold,' of the long forceless Medusa, Lucrezia Borgia.* It was partly in this spirit, and fearing lest sorrow should o'er

ON THE TOMBS IN WESTMINSTER. FRANCIS BEAUMONT. 'Mortality, behold and fear, What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within these heaps of stones; Here they lie, had realms and lands, Who now want strength to stir their hands; Where from their pulpits sealed with dust, They preach "In greatness is no trust." Here's an acre sown, indeed, With the richest, royallest seed That the earth did e'er suck in, Since the first man died for sin : Here the bones of birth have cried,

"Though gods they were, as men they died:' Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropped from the ruined sides of kings,

Here's a world of pomp and state,

Buried in dust, once dead by fate.'

leap itself, that Timanthes veiled with his robe the face of Agamemnon, at the sacrifice of the fair and innocent Iphianassa. And a candid reading of the whole passage very much favours the notion that Horace thought of the step which separates the pathetic, the specifically sublime, from the grotesque, the specifically ridiculous, when he recommended the enacting of murders behind the curtain. Niobe wept herself to an absurdity.

Instances abound of the grotesque in the manner of death. The exit of Empedocles from the world is not the worst example. He doomed

himself to a sultry suicide down the inner steeps of Ætna, in order that he might be accounted a god; but his slipper, vomited from the uneasy volcano, revealed at once the manner of his decease and the blasphemous conceit of his aspirations. A disappointment of the same nature, it has been surmised by the gentle Elia, the unfortunate Clarence may have experienced, who was possibly drowned in a liquor that was not malmsey! Absalom, and his Drydenic antitype, Monmouth, might meet here also on common ground.

'I owe much, I leave nothing, I give the rest to the poor;' so ran the last will and testament of Rabelais. In one sense, the most sublime and self-denying of bequests. For all students of humanity know that, since every man has very little in comparison with the boundless stores of what he has not, and since the treasures of an empire are easily packed in a corner of the great hopes of indigence, to give away these is immeasurably greater than to bequeath a paltry legacy restricted to the narrow limits of one's own proprietary. Again, every man, by possessing, proves the little worth of the object of his grasp; and is, therefore, little to be praised for freely dispensing what he knows to be essentially valueless. But to give away what has never been tarnished in your eyes by ownership-eminences, and gilded pinnacles, and purpled cloud-palaces of gods, from which proximity has not dispelled the enchantment-this is to alienate your truest sources of wealth and

satisfaction; this is to exhibit magnanimity of the most imperial order. Such reasoning is, of course, unassailable; and if it were our business to strew the flowers of sanctity over the memory of Rabelais, we might enforce it. At present, we leave his unique legacy to stand upon its own grotesque merits.

We conceive the jocular accessory of the execution of Sir Thomas More to be no true grotesque. Considering his character, there was nothing strained, nothing shockingly incongruous in his farewell to earth. He was an amiable, Christian philosopher, 'whose humility neither power nor piety could elate, and whose mirth even martyrdom could not spoil.' Christian people die daily: where a blameless life and a good conscience deprive the one inevitable event of its terror, there is perhaps no sufficient reason for a good man to vary the accustomed and calculated rotation of his moods. Every hour is a last hour, in so far as it might be so; and life is a doled-out succession of moments that are due to death. If More be unexcused, it is mere sophistry to palliate any merriment in the world.

To reduce theory to practice is oftentimes to risk the grotesque. Eminently this is the case in the department of feeling. Within the memory of the youngest of greyheaded men an illustrious personage died, and was universally lamented. As a sentiment, it would have been passably expressive to embody the whole people in one of the national emblems, and to say, 'The British lion mourns.' At that time a certain monumental lion disfigured a London thoroughfare. This animal took the opportunity of appearing indued with a pall hired by the day from some neighbouring undertaker. The pall, of course, fell flapping in the wind over the stark sides of the lion, now ruffling itself on the os coccygis, and anon dangling its white border over the countenance, as the cap frill of an ancient dame might fall about the face of her favourite cat. The passer-by, who took in all the circumstances much too faithfully for amusement, was astonished and horrified. His sorrow was too

knightly and loyal to be diverted into anything more cheerful than the momentary energy of rage and reprobation of the unconscious caricature of grief. But how grotesque would such an exhibition have been if an indifferent person, vainly sought in Europe-say a Chinaman, or a native British Columbian from the banks of the golden Sus-ka-chewan-could have been brought to witness it!

Perhaps our French neighbours are entitled to claim the most fearful examples of the grotesque in the mode of death. The martyrs of the first Revolution, recumbent on the framework of the guillotine, with neck bared for the knife, foamed against Heaven. But Rousseau, a man of the same language and race, has bespoken a grander arena on which to act his part in grotesqueness. He has engaged, when the shivering universe shall stand before its Judge, to challenge the Supreme

Being to an inspection of his 'Confessions' in octavo! The force of the madly sorrowful and ridiculous can no further go. Here the grotesque of sadness reaches at once climax and anti-climax; and here, within one word, our paper reaches its end.

Ernst ist das Leben-Life is a very serious thing, as the German poet sings; and plainly, so far as we can see, even because it is so serious, hath God given us the pleasant faculty of smiling and laughing, to accompany us in our hard adventures as some impish dwarf did the knights of medieval romance, that we may not be oppressed in spirit by excessive solitáry brooding over the weighty duties of which we are the champions.' May our dwarf, whose nourishment is chiefly the grotesque, be without malice, and our chivalrous representative be named Christopher, knight and saint!