In court-mourning also, we have an instance of men being instructed to mourn, where their feelings are neither interested nor concerned. In this case, the _disguised pomp_, spoken of by the Quakers, will be more apparent. Two princes have perhaps been fighting with each other for a considerable portion of their reigns. The blood of their subjects has been spilled, and their treasures have been exhausted. They have probably had, during all this time, no kind disposition one towards another, each considering the other as the aggressor, or as the author of the war. When both have been wearied out with expense, they have made peace. But they have still mutual jealousies and fears. At length one of them dies. The other, on receiving an express relative to the event, orders mourning for the deceased for a given time. As other potentates receive the intelligence, they follow the example. Their several levees or drawing-rooms, or places of public audience, are filled with mourners. Every individual of each sex, who is accustomed to attend them, is now habited in black. Thus a round of mourning is kept up by the courtiers of Europe, not by means of any sympathetic beating of the heart, but at the sound, as it were, of the postman's horn. But let us trace this species of mourning farther, and let us now more particularly look at the example of our own country for the elucidation of the point in question. The same Gazette, which gave birth to this black influenza at court, spreads it still farther. The private gentlemen of the land undertake to mourn also. You see them accordingly in the streets, and in private parties, and at public places, in their mourning habits. Nor is this all. Military officers, who have fought against the armies of the deceased, wear black crapes over their arms in token of the same sorrow. But the fever does not stop even here. It still spreads, and in tracing its progress, we find it to have attacked our merchants. Yes, the disorder has actually got upon _change_. But what have I said? Mourning habits upon change! Where the news of an army cut to pieces, produces the most cheerful countenances in many, if it raises the stocks but an half per cent. Mourning habits upon change, where contracts are made for human flesh and blood! Where plans that shall consign cargoes of human beings to misery and untimely death, and their posterity to bondage, are deliberately formed and agreed upon! O sorrow, sorrow! what hast thou to do upon change, except in the case of commercial losses, or disappointed speculation! But to add to this _disguised pomp_, as the Quakers call it, not one of ten thousand of the mourners, ever saw the deceased prince; and perhaps ninety nine in the hundred, of all who heard of him, reprobated his character when alive. CHAP. III.