_Les funérailles des fils_, says another French author, _sont toujours contre la nature quand les parents y assistant_. How often Edmund Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him “so gently from life,” and being sent, he adds, “to follow those who in course ought to have followed me.” In his famous letter to the Duke of Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: “I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors.” Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim: “If in the child the father’s image lies, Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived? Thou wast not to this end from me derived. If children predecease progenitors, We are their offspring, and they none of ours.” So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and having the melancholy office to close _his_.” And to his “dear little niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a very long day may _he_ close _your_ eyes, not as I have done those of your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be his inheritance.” Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian; for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end. Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who ... “beheld aghast, With Wilfrid all his projects pass, All turn’d and centred on his son, On Wilfrid all—and he was gone. ‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”