Romance, and perhaps faithful history, are full of details of the becoming deaths of ancient knights, upon the field. I question, however, if even Sir Philip Sidney’s was more dignified than that of a soldier of the 58th infantry, recorded in Nichols’s “Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.” A straggling shot had struck him in the stomach. As he was too dreadfully wounded to be removed, he desired his comrades would pray by him, and the whole guard knelt round him in prayer till he died. Bishop Hurd remarked, when this was told him, that “it was true religion.” There was more of religion in such sympathy than there was of taste in the condolence of Alnwick, on the death of Hugh, Duke of Northumberland--a rather irascible officer, and Knight of the Garter. “O,” cried the Alnwick poet-- “O rueful sight! Behold, how lost to sense The millions stand, suspended by suspense!” But all fruitlessly were the millions so suspended, for as the minstrel remarked in his Threnodia-- “When Time shall yield to Death, Dukes must obey.” “Dying in harness,” is a favorite phrase in chivalric annals to illustrate the bravery of a knight falling in battle, “clothed in complete steel.” So to die, however, was not always to die in a fray. Hume says of Seward, Earl of Northumberland, that there are two circumstances related of him, “which discover his high sense of honor and martial disposition. When intelligence was brought to him of his son Osborne’s death, he was inconsolable till he heard the wound was received on his breast, and that he had behaved with great gallantry in the action. When he found his own death approaching, he ordered his servants to dress him in a complete suit of armor, and sitting erect on the couch, with a spear in his hand, declared that in that position, the only one worthy of a warrior, he would patiently await the fatal moment.” See how the chief of many a field Prepares to give his latest breath; And, like a well-trimmed warrior, yield Becomingly t’impending death-- That one, stern conqueror of all, Of chieftain in embattled tower, Of lord within his ancient hall, And maiden in her trellised bower. To meet that surest of all foes, From off his soft and pillowed bed, With dignity old Seward rose, And to a couch of state was led. Fainting, yet firm of purpose there, Stately as monarch on his throne, Upright he sat, with kingly air, To meet the coming foe, alone. “Take from these limbs,” he weakly cried, “This soft and womanish attire; Let cloak and cap be laid aside-- Seward will die as died his sire: Not clad in silken vest and shirt, Like princes in a fairy tale; With iron be these old limbs girt-- My vest of steel, my shirt of mail.