I. The right of burying the dead is one of those originating in the voluntary law of nations. Next to the right of ambassadors Dion Chrysostom places that of burying the dead, and calls it a moral act, sanctioned by the unwritten law of nature: And Seneca, the elder, ranks the law, which commands us to commit the bodies of the dead to their parent earth, among the UNWRITTEN precepts, but says, they have a stronger sanction than the RECORDED laws of all ages can give. For, in the language of the Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, they are marked with the seal of nature, and under the name of nature, we comprehend the customs, that are common to all mankind, and agreeable to natural reason. We find it some where said by Aelian, that our common nature calls upon us to cover the dead, and some writer, in another place, observes that all men are reduced to an equality by returning to the common dust of the earth. Tacitus informs us, in b. vi. of his Annals, that, when Tiberius made a general massacre of all, who had been connected with Sejanus, and that he forbad them the rites of burial, every one was struck with horror to see the last offices of humanity refused; offices, which Lysias the orator calls the common hopes of our nature. As the ancients measured the moral character of every people by their observance or neglect of these rights, in order to give them a greater appearance of sanctity, they ascribed their origin to the authority and institutions of their Gods; so that in every part of their writings we meet with frequent mention of the rights of ambassadors, and the rights of burial, as founded upon divine appointment. In the Tragedy of the Suppliants, Euripides calls it the law of the Gods, and in the Antigone of Sophocles, the heroine makes the following reply to Creon, who had forbidden any one under pain of death, to give the rites of burial to Polynices, "A prohibition, like this, was not revealed by the supreme will, nor by that heaven-born justice, which has established those laws of respect for the dead: nor did I think that you could command mortals to transgress the unwritten and inviolable laws of God. They were not established to-day, nor yesterday, but from all eternity and will for ever be in force. Their sources are unknown. Am I through fear of a mortal, and by obeying his unjust commands, to incur the wrath of Heaven?" The authority of Isocrates, and of Herodotus, and that of Xenophon, in the sixth book of his Grecian History, may be appealed to in support of the honours, that have at all times been paid to the dead. In short, these offices of humanity are recommended by the conspiring testimony of the orators, historians, poets, philosophers and divines of all ages, who have dignified them with the names of the most splendid virtues.