Four millions of Egyptians cultivate the valley of the great river on whose banks, amidst the fertilizing dust of myriads of their progenitors, there are calculated still to exist, in a state of preservation, not less than from four hundred to five hundred millions of mummies. The “City of the Tombs” is far more populous than the neighboring streets even of crowded Constantinople; and the cemeteries of London and the catacombs of Paris are filled to overflowing. The trees which gave shade to our predecessors of a few generations back lie prostrate; and the dog and horse, the playmate and the servant of our childhood, are but dust. Death surrounds and sustains us. We derive our nourishment from the destruction of living organisms, and from this source alone. And who is there among us that has reached the middle term of existence, that may not, in the touching phrase of Carlyle, “measure the various stages of his life-journey by the white tombs of his beloved ones, rising in the distance like pale, mournfully receding milestones?” “When Wilkie was in the Escurial,” says Southey, “looking at Titian’s famous picture of the Last Supper in the refectory there, an old Jeronymite monk said to him, ‘I have sat daily in sight of that picture for now nearly threescore years; during that time my companions have dropped off one after another—all who were my seniors, all who were my cotemporaries, and many or most of those who were younger than myself; more than one generation has passed away, and there the figures in the picture have remained unchanged. I look at them, till I sometimes think that _they_ are the realities, and we but shadows.’”