SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE. _Intendale chi può; che non è stretto Alcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole._ ORLANDO INNAMORATO. Among the lost works of antiquity, there are few poems which I should so much rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. Landor has said of him that he and Pindar wrote nothing bad; that his characteristics were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an assiduous accuracy of description. “If I were to mention,” he adds “what I fancy would give an English reader the best idea of his manner, I should say, the book of Ruth.” One species of composition wherein he excelled was that which the Dutch in their straight-forward way call _Lykzangen_ or _Lykdichten_, but for which we have no appropriate name,—poems in commemoration of the dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found in the poetry of all countries, and this might be expected, threnodial being as natural as amatory verse; and as the characteristic of the latter is passion with little reflection, that of the former is, as naturally, to be at the same time passionate and thoughtful. Our own language was rich in such poems during the Elizabethan age, and that which followed it. Of foreign poets none has in this department exceeded Chiabrera. There is a passage among the fragments of Simonides which is called by his old editor consolatory, _παρηγορικόν_: but were it not for the authority of Seneca, who undoubtedly was acquainted with the whole poem, I should not easily be persuaded that so thoughtful, so pensive, so moralizing a poet would, in any mood of mind have recommended such consolation: _Τοῦ μὲν θανόντος οὐκ ἄν ἐνθυμοίμεθα, Εἴ τι φρονοῖμεν, πλεῖον ἡμέρας μιᾶς·_ let us not call to mind the dead, if we think of him at all, more than a single day. Indeed I am not certain from what Seneca says, whether the poet was speaking in his own, or in an assumed character, nor whether he spoke seriously or satirically; or I cannot but suspect that the passage would appear very differently, if we saw it in its place. Malherbe gives the same sort of advice in his consolation to M. du Périer upon the death of a daughter. _Ne te lasse donc plus d'inutiles complaintes; Mais sage à l'avenir, Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres éteintes Eteins le souvenir;_ such a feeling is much more in character with a Frenchman than with Simonides. Seneca himself, Stoic though he was, gave no such advice, but accounted the remembrance of his departed friends among his solemn delights, not looking upon them as lost: “_mihi amicorum defunctorum cogitatio dulcis ac blanda est; habui enim illos, tanquam amissurus; amissi tanquam habeam._”