with Harry on Saint Crispin's day, is described to the king with tears by Exeter, fresh from the field: it forced, the narrator says, "Those waters from me, which I would have stopp'd, But I had not so much of man in me, But all my mother came into mine eyes, K. Hen. I blame you not; For, hearing this, I must perforce compound Cranmer in tears is admired of a later Henry: "Look, the good man weeps! He's honest, on mine honour. He has strangled his language in his tears," and is too full-hearted, therefore, to thank his sovereign. Will Cæsar weep? is the whisper of bystanders and lookerson, when Octavius is parting with his sister, the April in her eyes: Eno. "Will Cæsar weep? He has a cloud in's face. Eno. He were the worse for that, were he a horse; Antony was Never be But Enobarbus has no notion of such goings-on. troubled with a rheum that year, and that was all. lieve in anything beyond that, until he, Enobarbus, is caught weeping too. Well, the whirligig of time brings round its revenges; and, later in the play, Enobarbus is caught weeping, or something very like, by his own avowal. For, remonstrating with Antony in so taking leave of his followers that their eyes run over, the bluff veteran exclaims, 66 -What mean you, Sir, To give them this discomfort? Look, they weep; And I, an ass, am onion-eyed; for shame, Transform us not to women." Antony's own capacity for tears is indicated in the other tragedy, when he turns from his lament over Cæsar's body to receive a MARK ANTONY; ROMEO; LAERTES. 69 messenger from Octavius, and notes the shock the man betrays at sight of the piece of bleeding earth: "Thy heart is big, get thee apart and weep. Friar Lawrence essays to check the tumults of Romeo's grief, by bootless appeals to his manhood. Nurse had previously tried to shame him, as he lay "there on the ground, with his own tears made drunk," and telling how she left Juliet lying in the same "piteous predicament," "blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering. Stand up, stand up; stand, an you be a man." While the Friar follows on with the reproach, "Thy tears are womanish ;" and fairly styles him, on that account, "unseemly woman, in a seeming man!" But there is more of philosophy in Laertes's style, when told of his sister's death by drowning-the conceit in the first line rather marring the natural earnestness of the others : "Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears: But yet It is our trick; nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will: when these are gone, Adam Smith asserts that he always appears, in some measure, mean and despicable, who is sunk in sorrow and dejection upon account of any calamity of his own; the weakness of sorrow never appearing in any respect agreeable, except when it arises from what we feel for others more than from what we feel for ourselves. But he allows that a son, upon the death of his father ("an indulgent and respectable father," at least), may give way to it without much blame-his sorrow being chiefly founded upon "a sort of sympathy with his departed parent;" into which humane emotion we readily enter. The Father of Political Economy could hardly do less, after austere Cato's approval of Juba's tears in such a case: Juba. Before my face in Cato's great example, Subdues my soul, and fills my eyes with tears. It is to the honour of gruff reprovers of an honest sorrow-to the honour of their feelings, not of their consistency—that they, sometimes in the act of blaming, are overcome too : "And blame ye, then, the Bruce, if trace Of tear is on his manly face, Blame ye the Bruce?-his brother blamed, By what Belford feels, at Clarissa's forlorn distress, which he so wishes Lovelace could have witnessed instead, he avows himself convinced, that a capacity of being moved by the woes of our fellow-creatures is "far from being disgraceful to a manly heart." "My heart and my eyes gave way to a softness of which (though not so hardened a wretch as thou) they were never before so susceptible." "Nay, my friend," says the stout sailor to Scott's Lovel, when the latter entrusts to him a farewell billet,-digesting a temporary swelling of the heart as he speaks," never be ashamed for the matter- -an affectionate heart may overflow for an instant at the eyes, if the ship were clearing for action." Manly Colonel Guy Mannering could not restrain his tears at seeing the change in his old friend, the Laird of Ellangowan; and his evident emotion at once gained him the confidence of the else friendless Lucy Bertram. When Dominie Sampson, again, came to recognise in the full-grown stranger from the East his well-remembered little Harry Bertram, he threw himself into his arms, pressing him a thousand times to his bosom in convulsions of transport, which shook his whole frame,-sobbed hysterically, and, at length, in the emphatic language of Scripture, lifted up his voice and wept aloud. Colonel Mannering had recourse to his handkerchief ; Pleydell made wry faces, and wiped the glasses of his spectacles; and honest Dinmont, after two loud blubbering explo A CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACE. 71 sions, exclaimed, "Deil's in the man! he's garr'd me do that I haena done since my auld mither died." Shallow judges of human nature, Lord Lytton pronounces those to be, who think that tears in themselves ever misbecome a man. Well did the sternest of romance writers, in his judgment, place the arch distinction of humanity, aloft from all meaner of heaven's creatures, in the prerogative of tears. "Sooner mayest thou trust thy purse to a professional pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew." But then the caveat is enforced, that when man weeps he should be alone-not because tears are weak, but because they should be sacred. W A CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACE. GENESIS xlvii. 29, 30. WHEN the time drew nigh that Israel, a sojourner in Egypt, must die,-after seventeen years' sojourning there, out of the hundred and forty-seven of Jacob's whole life, he called his son Joseph to him, and made him swear, with all formality and solemnity in the manner of the oath, that a last resting-place should be found for the patriarch in his own land and among his own kindred. "Deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt. But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place." And Joseph said, "I will do as thou hast said." And Jacob said to the Viceroy of Egypt, "Swear unto me." And he sware unto him. And Israel bowed himself upon the bed's head. He could now pray God to let His servant depart in peace. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that by faith Jacob, when he was a-dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph, and worshipped upon the top of his staff; and immediately he adds that by faith Joseph, too, when he was dying, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel, and gave commandment concerning his bones. For Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, as his father had done of him, saying, "God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence." Faith in the covenant of promise, as touching the land of promise, appears to have been foremost in the thoughts and aspirations of both sire and son; but we may also credit both with a natural yearning to lay their bones beside the bones of their fathers, and to be at home at last. Such was the natural yearning of aged Barzillai when he was for going a little way, and not more than a little way, over Jordan with the king, the day he was fourscore years old; and so soon as he should have gone that little way, he would fain know himself free to return: "Let thy servant, I pray thee, turn back again, that I may die in mine own city, and be buried by the grave of my father and of my mother.” It was a main point in the punishment denounced against the man of God that came from Judah to prophesy to Jeroboam, and that was deluded into disobedience in the discharge of his office, that his carcass should not come unto the sepulchre of his fathers. But the injunction of the remorseful old prophet by whom he had been misled, in regard to his own burial, bespoke anew the pangs of self-reproach as well as friendly interest which led him to mourn earnestly over the stranger he had buried in his own grave. “And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones." Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, as the Opiumeater has it, from public notice; they court privacy and solitude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes voluntarily sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man: thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Wordsworth) "humbly to express a penitential loneliness." Curiously |