DUST TO DUST: UNWEPT, UNHONOURED. JEREMIAH xxii. 18, 19. EHOIAKIM, the son of Josiah, king of Jerusalem, of a bad life was to make a bad end. For this was to be the ending of it as the prophet foretold, with the emphasized warrant or authority of a "Thus saith the Lord." When the time should come for Jehoiakim to die, none should lament for him, saying, "Ah, my brother!" or "Ah, lord!" or "Ah, his glory!" Unwept he should die, and unhonoured should his burial be even the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.* That man is esteemed to die miserable, says Jeremy Taylor in the Holy Dying, for whom no friend or relative sheds a tear, or pays a solemn sigh. "I desire to die a dry death, but am not very desirous to have a dry funeral :+ some flowers sprinkled upon my grave would do well and comely; and a soft shower to turn those flowers into a springing memory or a fair rehearsal, that I may not go forth of my doors as my servants carry the entrails of beast.' Jeremy the Christian preacher would have been of one mind with his namesake the Hebrew prophet, in that respect. "But some so like to thorns and nettles live, That none for them can, when they perish, grieve," says Edmund Waller in a translation of some French lines on fading flowers as a type of frail humanity,-we dying in our autumn, as the flowers in theirs; and as their leaves lie quiet on the ground, missed only by those who loved them, "so in the grave shall we as quiet be, missed by some few that loved our company," unless indeed like thorns and nettles we have lived, and then to be missed is only in the sense of relief. Now and then in history we come upon an instance of such * Into the historical difficulties connected with a literal fulfilment of this prediction, we may here well decline to enter. See the commentators on the passage, or avoid seeing them,-whichever may be best. + Italics in orig. UNWEPT, UNHONOURED. 239 a bad ending as that of Pompeius Strabo, hated by all parties for his selfish rapacity, whose body the Senate allowed to be dragged through the streets with a hook. Of Cinna, one historian of Rome writes, that "he died, disliked rather than detested by most men, regretted probably by none." Pizarro, the Conqueror of Peru, perished like a wretched outcast: "There was none, even," in the expressive language of the old chronicler (Gomara), "to say, God forgive him!" When Charlotte Corday had struck Marat to the heart, the piercing cries of his mistress were an astonishment to her, so incredible had she deemed it that such a man could be loved or regretted by a single fellow-creature. But Byron's note of exclamation, "Ah, surely nothing dies but something mourns!" has its echoes in history : "When Nero perish'd by the justest doom Of nations freed, and the world overjoy'd, Some hands unseen strew'd flowers upon his tomb: Of feeling for some kindness done, when power But even here the mourning itself was secret, the mourner unseen, unknown. Dean Swift, in his History of England, gives all proper emphasis to the bad ending that William Rufus made *—how the Red King's corpse was carried to Winchester in a cart, hurriedly and ignominiously, there to be buried the next day, "without solemnity, and, which is worse, without grief." Remembering the prestige attached to the great name of Gustavus Adolphus, it is almost startling to be told of him -not by any cynical Dean of St. Patrick's, or publicist of the Louis Veuillot type, but by soberest of sober historians, that albeit the hero-king died esteemed by all, even by his enemies, he was lamented by no one, not even by those whom he had saved the Roman Catholics rejoiced over the fall of their : * 66 Few among the worst of princes have had the luck to be so ill beloved or so little lamented."-Swift, Hist. of England. powerful adversary; and the Protestants, who now thought themselves strong enough without his help, were glad to bẹ freed from a master whom they envied and suspected. One might apply, under reserve, the words of La Bruyère in describing a certain dignified and impressive but unlamented decease: "Il a commencé par se faire estimer, il finit par se faire craindre. Cet ami, si ancien, si nécessaire, meurt sans qu'on pleure." But between the political application and the personal the distinction is one not without a difference that may be felt. A presumably inveterate gambler, and prospectively a ruined one,* is reminded by a caustic philosopher at the close of an unsparing epistle, that if he cannot live, he can die; and that dying, he will have this consolation: if he has steadily and inexorably vindicated the character of a gamester, his death will inflict no pang upon a single creature left behind him ; and he may find pleasing solace in the reflection that he never did the world a greater service than in now quitting it. Of handsome, useless, worthless James Conyers we hear in the story which describes his violent death, that of all who read an account of it in the newspapers, there was not one who shed a tear for him, not one who could say, "That man once *The ruined one in Mr. Thackeray's grim story, who shoots himself in bed, and is found lying there in a great pool of black blood, has this for his epitaph, and this only: "Regardez un peu," said his landlady to the lookers-on, "messieurs, il m'a gâté trois matelas, et il me doit quarantequatre francs." This was all his epitaph: he had spoilt three mattresses, and owed the landlady four-and-forty francs. In the whole world there was not a soul to love him or lament him. His best "friend" and intimate owns with shame that for this old school acquaintance, the chum of his early days, the merry associate of his recent ones, he had "not a tear or a pang. And mark the significant ending, the post mortem, of the Gambler's Death: He was nailed, testifies Michael Angelo Titmarsh, "into a paltry coffin, and buried at the expense of the arrondissement [Paris], in a nook of the burial-ground beyond the Barrière de l'Etoile. The three men who have figured in this history acted as Jack's mourners, and were almost drunk as they followed his coffin to its restingplace. After the ceremony was concluded, these gentlemen were very happy to get home to a warm and comfortable breakfast, and finished the day royally at Frascati's."-Paris Sketch Book. 66 WITHOUT A SINGLE FRIEND. 241 stepped out of his way to do me a kindness." Ellis Bell's Catherine exclaims to Heathcliff: "You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious, like him? Nobody loves you-nobody will cry for you when you die! I wouldn't be you!" Catherine spoke with a kind of dreary triumph. Not many chapters later we come upon the grim record of Heathcliff's death, who, after all, has one mourner, and that is poor Hareton, the most wronged. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest. He pressed its hand, and kissed the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating." Hawthorne has a suggestive tale of an elderly man, harsh in features and expression, who ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had waged warfare half a lifetime, to their common misery and ruin. The secret of this phenomenon is explained to be, that hatred had become the sustenance and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul; it had supplied the place of all kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died, the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. Only too cheap and plentiful are such types of character as Mr. Thackeray gave us in Captain Prior, with his coarse swagger and his Jeremy Diddlerism in the matter of petty loans, for whom, when he died, only two people in the world were sorry, his daughter Elizabeth, and his wife, who still loved the memory of the handsome young man who had wooed and won her. Mr. Trollope's Attorney-general, Sir Abraham Haphazard, bright as a diamond, and as cutting, but also as unimpressionable, is described as knowing every one whom to know was an honour, but without having a single friend, the meaning of which word was unknown to him except in its parliamentary sense: as a man of wit, he sparkled among the brightest at the dinner-tables of political grandees; glittering sparkles fell from him everywhere indeed, as from hot steel, but no heat; no cold heart was ever cheered by warmth from him, no unhappy soul ever dropped a portion of its burden at R his door. "And so he glitters along through the world, the brightest among the bright; and when his glitter is gone, and he is gathered to his fathers, no eye will be dim with a tear, no heart will mourn for its lost friend." The gentlemanly George Pauncefort of another novelist of note, utters in the handsomest of rooms and surroundings, and to the best-bred of good listeners, the lament: "There is scarcely a ruffian who ever went out of the debtor's door who has not been regretted more truly by some one or other than ever I shall be regretted." The Scrooge of Mr. Dickens's first Christmas story is badly off in the same way, though on other accounts; and when he dreams of himself as dead, it is only to hear pleasantries in chit-chat at his expense, such as one chatterer's comment on its being likely to be a very cheap funeral, “for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?" Which another jester won't mind doing if a luncheon is provided; but he must be fed, if he makes one. Further on we read how the old miser, by hypothesis a corpse, lay in the dark, empty house, with not a man, woman, or a child to say, he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearthstone: "What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.” But in an agony he implores the shadowy presence that attends him to show one living creature, if one be there, that feels emotion caused by his death. Is he to be an exception to the rule of our old English proverb, that when the devil is dead, he never wants a chief mourner? In James Montgomery's picture of the ideal burying-place of the Patriarchs, it is noteworthy that 66 not a hillock moulder'd near that spot, By one dishonour'd, or by all forgot : To some warm heart the poorest dust was dear, From some kind eye the meanest claim'd a tear." But this was in the World before the Flood; and many of us |