Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711), in his "Morning Hymn," has the following: "Each present day thy last esteem”; and in his "Evening Hymn": "Teach me to live that I may dread The grave as little as my bed." An inscription on a sun-dial tells us: "You have seen me (the sun) rise, but may not see me set." Then there is the motto (quoted in a previous footnote—see back) : "Disce ut semper victurus; Vive ut cras moriturus." St. Jerome wrote: "Sic quotidie vivamus quasi die illo judicandi simus." From the Latin epigrams of John Owen or "Johannes Audoenus" (died 1622), Prof. E. Bensly quotes the following epitaph on an atheist : "Mortuus est quasi victurus post funera non sit; Any one following Horace's advice literally might almost say: "Quocunque aspicio, nihil est nisi mortis imago" (Ovid, Trist., i. 11, 23). W. E. H. Lecky," in regard to the Stoic philosophers, wrote as follows: “But while it is certain that no philosophers expatiated upon death with a grander eloquence, or met it with a more placid courage, it can hardly be denied that their constant disquisitions forced it into an unhealthy prominence, and somewhat discoloured their whole view of life." He also quoted from Francis Bacon's Essays: "Of Death" (the second essay of the 1625 edition of the Essays): "The Stoics bestowed too much cost upon death, and by their great preparations made it appear more fearful." p. 202. W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals, 1905 edition, vol. i. The being ready for death was made the subject of a punning seventeenth-century epitaph on a gentleman named Ready: "Bless'd is the man that Ready is for Death Then bless'd was he who here lies underneath, [This epitaph may be compared to one in Peterborough Cathedral to the memory of Sir Richard Worme (died 1589), commencing: "Does Worm eat Worme?" Amongst punning inscriptions relating to death is the one inscribed on the cornice of the chimney-piece in the drawing-room of Loseley Hall, near Guildford: "Morus tarde moriens [the verb monet must be supplied here] Morum cito moriturum." This is associated with the mulberry-tree rebus of the More family, who built Loseley Hall in the sixteenth century. A rebus "punning" sepulchral monument in one of the City churches of London is referred to by a reviewer of this book in the Lancet. It is that of a person named Cage, and the rebus device consists of a heavily barred iron grating, through the bars of which are looking out a number of skulls.] Again, Horace writes (Epist. Mor., lib. viii. Ep. i. (70), 18): "On nothing is meditation so necessary (as on death)."" According to Socrates (as quoted by Cicero, Tusc. Disputat., i. 30, 74) the whole life of philosophers is a studying of death, and wise men (Plato's Phaedo, 64, A) "practise nothing else but to be ready to die"; the preparation for death is the learning of truth, justice, and goodness (the "mysteries" of this life and the life to come). "Let all live as they would die" (George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs, 1639). "Lebe, wie du, wenn du stirbst, Wünschen wirst gelebt zu haben" (Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, 1715-1769). Compare an inscription on a sixteenth-century sepulchral monument, attributed to the great French sculptor, Jean A Danish memorial medal of George Hojer (1670) has the inscription "Mors omnibus aequa on the obverse, and "Vita est meditatio on the reverse. Goujon, in the Church of St. Gervais and St. Protais at Gisors:: Fay maintenant ce que voudras The main idea in Ecclesiasticus (ch. xxviii. 6) is of course the same: "Remember thy end, and let enmity cease; remember corruption and death, and abide in the commandments." So also in the 90th Psalm (ver. 12, after Luther's translation): "Teach us to remember that we must die, so that we may become wise." In regard to all this Montaigne, the essayist, wrote: "I never saw any peasant among my own neighbours set himself to cogitate with what countenance and assurance he should meet his last hour. Nature teaches him not to dream about death until he is dying; and then he does it with a better grace than Aristotle, on whom death presses doubly hard, both because of itself and because of the long anticipation of it. . . . It is only your learned men who dine any the worse for the thought of it when they are in full health, and who shudder at the idea of death. Your common man has no need of remedy or consolation until the actual shock of the blow comes, and thinks no more about it than just what he suffers." In one of his writings Montaigne professes himself of Caesar's opinion, that the death most to be desired is that which is the least premeditated and the shortest. "If Caesar dared to say it, it is no cowardice in me to believe it." In regard to his own preparedness for death Montaigne declared: "I am at all times prepared as much as I am like to be, and the coming of death will teach me nothing new. We should always, as far as in us lies, be booted and spurred, and ready to set off. . . . Never was Montaigne also observed that every day travels towards death, but only one's last day reaches it. On the other hand, death has been so often and popularly compared to a long journey or voyage that the idea of death may be personified by the figure of a traveller with his hand for ever raised in a gesture of bidding good-bye. In the same way, leaving loved persons and familiar scenes often acts as a memento mori and momentarily makes the traveller think of the "eternal farewell"; in that sense, "to travel is to die continually." man prepared to quit the world more absolutely and entirely, and detach myself from it more completely than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best. We are born for action: I would have a man act and go on with the duties of life so long as he is able; and then, let death find me planting my cabbages, but not concerned at his approach, and still less that I am leaving my garden unfinished." W. Lucas Collins, from whose excellent little book on Montaigne (1879, pp. 123, 124, 126, 131) I make these quotations, writes that Montaigne contends that "the highest blessing that virtue can confer upon us is the contempt of death. If philosophy teaches us to despise poverty, or pain, or sorrow, it is well. But some men's lives such accidents touch but little; and at the worst, from all of them death will relieve us. It is death only which comes inevitably to all men. If we tremble at it, 'how can we advance a single step in life without an aguefit? The remedy of the vulgar is not to think about it at all'; 'most people cross themselves at the very word, as though it were the name of the Devil.' . . . 'Let us disarm Death of his strangeness: let us converse with him, grow familiar with him; let us have nothing so often in our thoughts as Death. . . . In our feasts and revels let there evermore occur to us, as a refrain, the thought of our condition.' . . . For his own part, Montaigne declares that, but for thus accustoming himself to the thought, he should live in perpetual terror." The ancient writers console one for the "Charybdis which awaits all alike by a variety of arguments. Cf. Simonides (Anthol. Gracc. Palat., x. 105): Oaváτo Θανάτῳ πάντες ὀφειλόμεθα. The ancients point out that death is a natural law, and as necessary as birth is: "Lex non poena mors"; 9 Better, "Lex est, non poena, mori." Cf. part of epitaph (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. vi. No. 11252): "Mors etenim hominum natura non poena est." Lucan (Pharsalia, vii. 470), however, speaks of death (mors), "quae cunctis poena paratur." A Zenonian syllogism was: "No evil is honourable: but death is honourable: therefore death is not evil." "Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet' (Manilius); "Constat aeternâ positumque lege est, ut constet genitum nihil (Boëthius); Principium moriendi natale est." 10 Cicero and Seneca offer much philosophic consolation." Cicero, in his De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, speaks of Socrates as having "first drawn wisdom down from heaven." In the first 11 10 In Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act i., Scene 2) similar ordinary philosophic arguments are used by the King and Queen in their endeavours to console Hamlet for the death of his father : : "Thou know'st 'tis common, all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity." "But, you must know, your father lost a father; This might have been suggested by the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, where, in the eighth book (Meric Casaubon's translation), the following passage occurs, not as a consolation, but as a kind of memento mori :-"Lucilla buried Verus; then was Lucilla herself buried by others. So Secundus Maximus, then Secunda herself. So Epitynchanus, Diotimus; then Epitynchanus himself. So Antoninus Pius, Faustina his wife; then Antoninus himself. This is the course of the world." William Seward translated some Latin lines written by Lady Jane Grey, as follows: "To mortal's common fate thy mind resign, My lot to-day; to-morrow may be thine." In the account of "Old St. Paul's," by J. Saunders, in Charles Knight's London (H. G. Bohn, 1851, vol. iv. p. 268) the following epitaph is mentioned: “Lo, Thomas Mind, esquire by birth, doth under turned lie, To show that men, by nature's law, are born to live and die!" On this Saunders makes the philosophical satirical comment: "The imagination starts back in awe as it asks, What would have been the consequences had this gentleman been unwilling to be made such an example of?" 11 For much on the whole subject of philosophic consolation, see R. Burton's references to ancient authors in his Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 (Part 2, Sect. 3, M. 5), and W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals (first edition, 1869; new edition, 1877). For similar philosophic consolation in modern times we may refer to Maurice Maeterlinck's little book on Death, English translation by A. Teixeira de Mattos, London, 1911. |