The circumstances that lead to Death, and not our actual dissolution, are alone of a terrific nature; for Death is, in fact, the end and cure of all the previous sufferings and horrors with which it is so frequently accompanied. In the dark ages of monkish bigotry and superstition, the deluded people, seduced into a belief that the fear of Death was acceptable to the great and beneficent author of their existence, appear to have derived one of their principal gratifications in contemplating this necessary termination of humanity, yet amidst ideas and impressions of the most horrible and disgusting nature: hence the frequent allusions to it, in all possible ways, among their preachers, and the personification of it in their books of religious offices, as well as in the paintings and sculptures of their ecclesiastical and other edifices. They seemed to have entirely banished from their recollection the consolatory doctrines of the Gospel, which contribute so essentially to dissipate the terrors of Death, and which enable the more enlightened Christian to abide that event with the most perfect tranquillity of mind. There are, indeed, some exceptions to this remark, for we may still trace the imbecility of former ages on too many of our sepulchral monuments, which are occasionally tricked out with the silly appendages of Death's heads, bones, and other useless remains of mortality, equally repulsive to the imagination and to the elegance of art. If it be necessary on any occasion to personify Death, this were surely better accomplished by means of some graceful and impressive figure of the Angel of Death, for whom we have the authority of Scripture; and such might become an established representative. The skulls and bones of modern, and the entire skeletons of former times, especially during the middle ages, had, probably, derived their origin from the vast quantities of sanctified human relics that were continually before the eyes, or otherwise in the recollection of the early Christians. But the favourite and principal emblem of mortality among our ancestors appears to have been the moral and allegorical pageant familiarly known by the appellation of the _Dance of Death_, which it has, in part, derived from the grotesque, and often ludicrous attitudes of the figures that composed it, and especially from the active and sarcastical mockery of the ruthless tyrant upon its victims, which may be, in a great measure, attributed to the whims and notions of the artists who were employed to represent the subject.