not to the wealth, but deserts of the party interred. Yet may we see some rich man of mean worth loaden under a tomb big enough for a prince to bear. There were officers appointed in the Grecian games, who always, by public authority, did pluck down the statues erected to the victors, if they exceeded the true symmetry and proportion of their bodies. We need such nowadays to order monuments to men's merits, chiefly to reform such depopulating tombs as have no good fellowship with them, but engross all the room, leaving neither seats for the living nor graves for the dead. It was a wise and thrifty law which Reutha, King of Scotland, made, that noblemen should have so many pillars, or long pointed stones, set on their sepulchres as they had slain enemies in the wars. If this order were also enlarged to those who in peace had excellently deserved of the Church or commonwealth, it might well be revived.

Over-costly tombs are only baits for sacrilege. Thus sacrilege hath beheaded that peerless prince, King Henry the Fifth, the body of whose statue on his tomb in Westminster was covered over with silver plate gilded, and his head of massy silver; both which now are stolen away: yea, hungry palates will feed on coarser meat. I had rather Mr. Stow,* than

* In the Description of London.

I, should tell you of a nobleman who sold the monuments of noblemen, in St. Augustine's Church in Broad Street, for an hundred pounds, which cost many thousands, and in the place thereof made fair stabling for horses; as if Christ, who was born in a stable, should be brought into it the second time. It was not without cause in the civil law that a wife might be divorced from her husband, if she could prove him to be one that had broken the sepulchres of the dead: for it was presumed he must needs be a tyrannical husband to his wife, who had not so much mercy as to spare the ashes of the departed.

The shortest, plainest, and truest epitaphs are best. I say, the shortest; for when a passenger sees a chronicle written on a tomb, he takes it on trust some great man lies there buried, without taking pains to examine who he is. Mr. Cambden, in his "Remains," presents us with examples of great men that had little epitaphs. And when once I asked a witty gentleman, an honored friend of mine, what epitaph was fittest to be written on Mr. Cambden's tomb, "Let it be," said he, "CAMBDEN'S REMAINS.'

I say also the plainest; for except the sense. lie above-ground, few will trouble themselves to dig for 't. Lastly, it must be true: not as in some monuments, where the red veins in the

marble may seem to blush at the falsehoods written on it. He was a witty man that first taught a stone to speak, but he was a wicked man that taught it first to lie.

A good memory is the best monument. Others are subject to casualty and time, and we know that the pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders. To conclude, let us be careful to provide rest for our souls, and our bodies will provide rest for themselves. And let us not be herein like unto gentlewomen, which care not to keep the inside of the orange, but candy and preserve only the outside thereof.

OF DEFORMITY.

DEFO EFORMITY is either natural, voluntary, or adventitious, being either caused by God's unseen providence (by men nicknamed chance) or by man's cruelty. We will take them in order.

If thou beest not so handsome as thou wouldst have been, thank God thou art no more unhandsome than thou art. 'T is his mercy thou art not the mark for passengers' fingers to point at, an heteroclite in nature, with some member defective or redundant.

Be glad that thy clay cottage hath all the necessary rooms thereto belonging, though the outside be not so fairly plastered as some others.

Yet is it lawful and commendable by art to correct the defects and deformities of nature. Ericthonius being a goodly man from the girdle upwards, but, as the poets feign, having downwards the body of a serpent (moralize him to have had some defect in his feet), first invented chariots, wherein he so sat that the upper parts of him might be seen, and the rest of his body concealed. Little heed is to be given to his lying pen, who maketh Anna Bollen, mother to Queen Elizabeth, the first finder- out and wearer of ruffs, to cover a wen she had in her neck. Yet the matter 's not much; such an addition of art being without any fraud or deceit.

Mock not at those who are misshapen by nature. There is the same reason of the poor and of the deformed; he that despiseth them, despiseth God that made them. A poor man is a picture of God's own making, but set in a plain frame, not gilded; a deformed man is also his workmanship, but not drawn with even lines and lively colors: the former, not for want of wealth, as the latter not for want of skill, but both for the pleasure of the maker. As for Aristotle, who would have parents expose their

deformed children to the wide world without caring for them, his opinion herein, not only deformed but most monstrous, deserves rather to be exposed to the scorn and contempt of all

men.

Some people, handsome by nature, have wilfully deformed themselves; such as wear Bacchus his colors in their faces, arising not from having, but being, bad livers. When the woman (1 Kings, iii. 21) considered the child that was laid by her, "Behold,” said she, “it was not my son which I did bear." Should God survey the faces of many men and women, he would not own and acknowledge them for those which he created, many are so altered in color, and some in sex, women to men, and men to women, in their monstrous fashions, so that they who behold them cannot by the evidence of their apparel give up their verdict of what sex they are.

Confessors which wear the badges of truth are thereby made the more beautiful, though deformed in time of persecution for Christ's sake through men's malice. This made Constantine the Great to kiss the hole in the face of Paphnutius, out of which the tyrant Maximinus had bored his eye for the profession of the faith, the good emperor making much of the socket even when the candle was put out. Next these, wounds in war are most honor