gigantic exploits will still more resemble the rock of St. Helena rising "majestic 'mid the solitude of time." How beautiful are many of our country church-yards, filled with humble graves and covered with wild flowers. This is the case particularly in Wales. Some country burying-grounds have a character of seclusion and peace that almost reconcile us to the resignation of life. We almost wish to be located in them-to "steal from the world" into them. The mind of man must surely be in a state of aberration when it is busying itself among the tumults of active life, and toiling amid boisterous crowds in dissatisfaction; or else it would not contemplate tranquility with such pleasure, even the tranquility of the grave! The burying-places in and around London offer little to the eye in the shape of monuments that is worth seeing; a heavy sameness reigns every where, and the inscriptions, which in sentiment or correctness do not always harmonise with the rank of the deceased in life, are stupid, fulsome, and hackneyed. Indeed for the most part they are penned in the very mediocrity of dulness. An epitaph must be either very bad or very good to be tolerated; and it is to these two extremes that the epitaph collector confines himself. A church-yard is a species of album, in which are recorded the effusions of the educated and uneducated, of stiff heraldic scholarship, and of simple affectionate sorrow. If the latter tell a lie on a tomb, still there is an amiable excuse for so doing, which the former is without; thus, if a child erect a tombstone over its parent, or a widow over her husband, if they say the deceased was the most perfect of beings, we can excuse it, for they, no doubt, thought him so. The heraldic or scholastic liar in epitaphs is a different character, he sins in open day; and when he tells us with a flourish that Sam. Scrip lies below, who was a most charitable and humane man, and yet never gave a farthing in his life to the poor that the law did not force him to give, and performed not a single good action, nay, actually died of grief, though worth half a million, because he lost ten thousand on a mortgage, we are disgusted at such a perversion of truth. Inscriptions over the dead are of great antiquity, but have no rules to restrain or modify them. Those most admired have been terse and short, as that over Tasso, "Ossa Torquati Tasso"-" The bones of Torquato Tasso." There is great beauty in this, it is in the cemetry of Pere Lachaise, and is inscribed on a broken column: "Ma Mere." This from Malherbe, on the tomb of a young lady, is sweetly applied: Et elle a véçu, ce que vivent les roses L'espace d'un matin! The following is asserted by Boileau to be the best epigrammatic epitaph ever written : Cy gist ma femme-ah! qu'elle est bien Pour son repos, et pour le mien! A village chorister of Hanover, after the death of a beautiful girl whom he loved, carved rudely on her tombstone a rose, and beneath it the words C'est ainsi qu'elle fut! One of our best epitaph writers was Ben Jonson. Pope's are artificial and unnatural, with few exceptions. Jonson's to the memory of the Countess of Pembroke is well known, and that on Elizabeth L- H— is nearly equal to it in merit; that to Sir J. Roe is very pleasing. I'll not offend thee with a vain tear more, My first ramble was into the church-yard of Paddington, the excellent state of which reflects great credit on the parish. The scenery is pretty, but the buildings of this limitless city are making rapid advances towards it. The Green on one side, with its huge old elms, recals ancient times, when the neighbourhood of the dead was that of sport and merriment during holidays Shady trees grow in the church-yard over the tombs, and the nettles and ruder weeds are cleared away. The number of tombstones is great, but there is scarcely a striking inscription or noted name recorded among them. On a humble stone, erected by Lord Petre to the memory of Dr. Geddes, who died in 1802, aged 65, is the following liberal extract from his works: -"Christian is my name and Catholic my surname; I grant that you are a Christian as well as I, and embrace you as my fellow disciple in Jesus, and if you were not a disciple of Jesus, still I would embrace you as my fellow man." The following wretched doggrel appears upon a stone erected to one J. Russel: The grave is a sweet bed of roses There is something touching in the simplicity of the following:"Farewell, Eliza! The recollection of thy many and rare virtues will be long and tenderly cherished in the affectionate regrets of thy afflicted father, sister, and brother!" There are some mortuary inscriptions that appear more than once in every church-yard, such as those beginning "Afflictions sore long time I bore ;" and "The world is a city full of crooked streets," &c. well known to be from the “unlettered muse." In these cases, it is probable, the verse of poetry essential on a tomb-stone in the opinion of the poor man, is left to be selected by the stone-cutter, whose acquaintance with the muse extends no farther than to two or three well-known ditties, and these he uses indiscriminately, and generally misspells. There is about some inscriptions, too, an endeavour to render death palatable to survivors, by recording the advantages of it, in order to make the best of an evil (if it be an evil) which cannot be avoided. In this burying-ground there is a monument to the memory of Eleanor Boucher, daughter of J. Addison, Esq. of Oxon Hill, Maryland, America, who appears to have been a relative of the noted Addison. It concludes thus:-" After a long series of ill health, supported with a resignation truly Christian, on the 1st of March 1784, at the age of 44, she closed her valuable life, having, like her relation the celebrated Mr. Addison, been oppressed by a shortness of breath, which was aggravated by a dropsy. Like Addison, also, she shewed in the man ner of her death, in what peace a Christian can die." Addison's daughter, by the Countess of Warwick, died at Bilton in Warwickshire in 1797, very old and weak in her intellects; but what other branches of his family, if any, yet remain, either in England or America, is not generally known. The following is almost the only tolerable epitaph of the more lengthy kind in the burying-ground. On THOMAS WALKER, born 1777, died 1818. Bounds the warm tide of youth along thy veins?— And hurl'd him in the grave. Dark are the ways O ponder this in lowliness of soul, And, with a holy fear pass on--farewell! SONG, BY T. CAMPBELL. EARL March look'd on his dying child, She's at the window many an hour And her love look'd up to Ellen's bower, But ah! so pale, he knew her not, Though her smile on him was dwelling. And am I then forgot-forgot?— It broke the heart of Ellen. In vain he weeps, in vain he sighs, Nor love's own kiss shall wake those eyes V. MODERN PILGRIMAGES. NO. V.-LONDON. "But our scene's London now; and by the rout COWLEY, Prol. to The Guardian. LONDON, the proud metropolis of Britain, the cradle of independent principles in religion and government, the rich, the mighty, the munificent, need scarcely boast, as an adjunct to her fame, of having given birth to great men. And as from a distance I gaze upon the sombre majesty of atmosphere above her, through which are dimly seen, rearing themselves like shadowy giants, her thousand domes and spires, I think how insignificant is man lost amid the stupendous work of his own hands. But to a moment's reflection, what are its riches or its beauty compared to the moral grandeur reaped through many an age of strife and turmoil and revolution. Her aspect is new fo me-I am a stranger to her walls, and every step I tread, every name that strikes upon mine ear, recals vividly the scenes of past history, which till now I had contemplated but in the lifeless page of the historian. The early and imprudent reigns of the first Stuarts are present to my mind: -Where then was the firm bulwark of English liberty?—In this City. During the Craft-won ascendancy of the hypocritical godly, where did common sense and freedom still find refuge ?-In this City. And at the hour of Restoration, who routed the dregs of democracy, and rallied round the throne ?-This City. England's millions of acres, all united, could not sum the host of noble associations excited by this immortal spot. In itself, in its aspect and age alone, the "City of the Human Powers" commands an interest mightier than I dare attempt to grasp. A ruin, or a stream, or a village, hallowed by a single name, is quite enough for me; but it would require more than Herculean powers to cope with this hydra of an hundred heads. We may seek to magnify the associations of the rural nook; but this little world must be viewed through the wrong end of the telescope, and even the microcosm would be overpowering. We must select a single name from out the roll, in the worship and admiration of which, must be forgotten the thousand others that are obtruded upon our notice. And what name shall we choose to be the spirit of so great a shrine? What metropolitan of fame, or, to use the language of the day, what cockney shall be the hero of our theme? Shall it be Hampden, or Milton, or Pope? Shall our pilgrimage be to Bread-street, Cheapside, or Burnhill-fields, in honour of the blind Bard? Or shall we track from lodging to lodging the mighty critic, who preferred Fleet-street even to the Highlands? But age giveth precedency, and our judgment might have anticipated this rule of decision, by fixing at once on the father of English Poetry to represent the oldest and noblest city of Britain. There is no poet of the olden time for whom I have such a regard as for Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakspeare is too universal, and Milton too austere, to excite any personal feelings of love towards them. But Chaucer, little as he speaks of himself, is manifested in his writings as a gay, good-humoured, kind-hearted soul, "such as the Muses love." More thoroughly English than any poet of our land, his prevailing mood, his staple feeling, is rich and exuberant humour. He delights in a broad, but not in a malicious grin. His mirth is always tempered with sensiblity, and is of that kind, which is built not on a paucity, but upon a superabundance of feeling. But to me, I must confess, his most pleasing peculiarity is his cockneyism:-he is manifestly the inhabitant of a great city, that has a mass of fellow-creatures ever bustling around him, and hence is possessed of that store of observation and acuteness, that air of continual society, which the poets of the fields seldom possess. I like also the freshness of feeling, with which he enjoys a green mead, his frequent reference to May and Mayscenes, and the liveliness of spirit which he always assumes the moment he enters on rural description. This to me is far more delicious and poetical than the cold and languid air, with which the dweller among fields generally enumerates in verse the beauties to which he has grown dead, and with which he has become too familiar. Compare parallel passages in Chaucer and Thomson, and the distinction will be instantly perceived. In the pictures of the former, nature brightens up, and the inanimate objects viewed by the poet, seem to catch life from the spirit with which he regards them ;-in the descriptions of the latter, every thing is faithfully, but languidly pourtrayed-nature droops with the contemplative spirit of the poet, who moralizes and philosophises over the scene, instead of enjoying it—he finds no matter of excitement in the objects of his every-day life, and when he fancies himself in love. with rural and picturesque beauty, he is but fond of ease and languor, and the sloth of an idle day-dream. But this spirit of painting inanimate nature is not the only peculiarity which Chaucer owed to his town-life. His portraiture of character, and figure, and dress,-the inimitable strokes which rival the palpable pow er of the artist's pencil, in presenting a picture to one's imaginationall this is owing to his having spent his days in this busy haunt of men. His power in comic description is amazing-it is not like painting a picture, but unrolling it-sometimes a line or a word, aided by the quaintness of the style, flashes a whole picture at once on the view. As when he calls the Frere "a full solempné man." It seems at times as if every character had sitten for the picture, so well are not only the general traits, but is each individual mark touched off to the life :"Somwhat he lisped for his wantonnesse, To make his English swete upon his tongue; As don the sterres in a frosty night." And of the Miller, 66 Upon the copright of his nose he hade A wert, and thereon stode a tuft of heres, His nose-thirles blacké were and wide," &c. Of his feelings towards the place of his birth, Chaucer has left one most affectionate record. "Also the citye of London, that is to me so dere and swete, in which I was forth growen; and more kindely love have I to that place, than to any other in yerth, as every kindely creture hath full appetite to that place of his kindely engendrure, and to |