What—asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations, discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone, of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many; but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,—and these are of them in the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out generation after generation of civic worthies: “So with the tomb of the old Master of the Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked out.” To quote Chaucer again: “That is to seyn, in youthe or elles in age, He moot ben deed, the kyng as schal a page.” Cranmer’s transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the end—the strain subsiding into a minor key—by the unwelcome but inevitable reflection, “But she must die.” So muses and moralises Talbot again, in another of the historical plays: “But kings and mightiest potentates must die; For that’s the end of human misery.” And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is nothing left him but his body’s length, exclaims, as one that at last feels it feelingly, “Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must.” And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork, “Even so must I run on, and even so stop.”