Heaven was impatient of our crimes, And sent his minister of death To scourge the bold rebellion of the times, And to demand our prophet's breath. He came commissioned for the fates Of awful Mead and charming Bates: There he essay'd the vengeance first, Then took a dismal aim, and brought GREAT GOUGE to dust. GREAT GOUGE to dust! how doleful is the sound! How vast the stroke is! and how wide the wound!— Sion grows weak and England poor; Nature herself with all her store Can furnish such a pomp for death no more. This was pretty well for a threnodial flight. But Dr. Watts went farther. When Mr. Howe should die, (and Howe was then seventy years of age,) he thought it would be time that the world should be at an end,—and prayed that it might be so. Eternal God! command his stay! Stretch the dear months of his delay;— O we could wish his age were one immortal day! But when the flaming chariot's come And shining guards to attend thy Prophet home, Amidst a thousand weeping eyes, Send an Elisha down, a soul of equal size; _Or burn this worthless globe, and take us to the skies!_ What would the Dissenters have said if a clerical poet had written in such a strain upon the decease of a Bishop or Archbishop? We pray in the Litany to be delivered from sudden death. Any death is to be deprecated which should find us unprepared: but as a temporal calamity with more reason might we pray to be spared from the misery of an infirm old age. It was once my fortune to see a frightful instance of extreme longevity,—a woman who was nearly in her hundredth year. Her sight was greatly decayed, though not lost; it was very difficult to make her hear, and not easy then to make her understand what was said, though when her torpid intellect was awakened she was, legally, of sane mind. She was unable to walk, or to assist herself in any way. Her neck hung in such wrinkles that it might almost be likened to a turkey's; and the skin of her face and of her arms was cleft like the bark of an oak, as rough, and almost of as dark a colour. In this condition, without any apparent suffering, she passed her time in a state between sleeping and waking, fortunate that she could thus beguile the wearisomeness of such an existence.