In the portion of Jezreel—by a retributive local coincidence—were to lie the mangled remains of Jezebel—what the dogs should leave of her. “And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.” _This_, Jezebel? how could _this_ be identified with the superb wife and superior of the king of Israel, as she was in her prime of life and pride of place? or even with the faded form of her that, newly a widow, but energetic and manœuvring to the last, and defiant in her fall, painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at the window as Jehu entered in at the gate? Imperious Jezebel, thrice puissant and insatiably presuming, transformed into a heap of bone dust—reduced to her lowest terms as mere organic matter—resolved into just so much manure upon the face of the field. “Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that the earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.” So muses and speculates Hamlet, on the theme of “to what base uses we may return, Horatio,” when his imagination traces the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole. ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so, Horatio may object. Not a jot, is Hamlet’s answer to the objection; for look you, Alexander died, was buried, was resolved into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam. “And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?” _Quod erat demonstrandum._ The Prince of Denmark was in the like mood when, in other company, he talked, to the same purpose, of how a man may fish with the worm[12] that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. Well may Juvenal bid the meditative moralist, _expende Annibalem_, and expound the text that _Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum corpuscula_. But it needs a Shakspeare to reduce these to their lowest terms, in the style of Hamlet with imperious Cæsar,—a _reductis ad absurdum_ indeed. Sydney Smith somewhere girds at the idea of doctrinaire legislators making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades, “and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to brocoli, and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus.” Hawthorne once designed a symbolical tale of a young man being slain and buried in the flower garden of his betrothed, and the earth levelled over him. That particular spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers, produces them of admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume; and thus the classic fantasy is realized, of dead people transformed to flowers. Sir Thomas Browne—how pregnant his hints are!—touches on Mummy as having become merchandize: Mizraim curing wounds, and Pharaoh being sold for balsams.