Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of preservation—by Gibbon, for example—of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this,—“that one thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as elsewhere.” Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all.”[16] Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature was the imagination of his own decease. And Commines relates how physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, “pour lui allonger la vie. Toutefois le tout n’y fasoit rien; et falloit qu’il passât par là où les autres ont passés.” And he died. All stories have the same ending. “The Frenchman first in literary fame; Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same, With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied, Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily—and died.” That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom “one fine line,” Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” tells his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton’s critic, bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s utterance:— “O! mortal folke, you may beholde and see Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight. The end of joye and prosperitie Is death at last thorough his course and might. After the day there cometh the dark night, For though the day appear ever so long, At last the bell ringeth to evensong—” “Ringeth,” says Mrs. Browning, “in our ear with a soft and solemn music, to which the soul is prodigal of echoes.”