Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, “amusing himself,” as the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense—with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. The “Spectator” could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s life. “One is so certain of the man’s having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it.” The man—a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the stanzas that are most to the purpose:— “Once in the flight of ages past, There lived a man: and who was he? Mortal! howe’er thy lot be cast, That man resembled thee. ... “He suffered,—but his pangs are o’er; Enjoy’d,—but his delights are fled; Had friends,—his friends are now no more; And foes,—his foes are dead. ... “He saw whatever thou hast seen; Encounter’d all that troubles thee: He was—whatever thou hast been; He is—what thou shalt be. ... “The annals of the human race, Their ruins, since the world began, Of him, afford no other trace Than this,—THERE LIVED A MAN!” There lived a man—lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured—enjoyed the common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer:— “Yit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde, In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde.”