Here we conclude such notices of the lives, deaths, and memorials of the Paleologi, and their friend the old knight at Clifton and his family as have been found available. Have you anything further to say of them, you ask, ere we leave the little sanctuary? What _can_ there be said further--would be the obvious reply--concerning those whose lives, deaths, burial-places and memorials, have all been duly noticed and recorded? Well, for once, not even the fastness of the grave will be proof against some additional remembrances of the Paleologi. Man's curiosity is unbounded and insatiable. No place or association is altogether safe from the intrusion of his prying eyes and ransacking fingers, if he thinks there is anything likely to be found therein calculated to gratify its longings, and he gets the chance, or has permission to make the search. In this particular he follows in the trail of death as being no respecter of persons, but with this ignoble difference to the great conqueror, that he waits until the life is gone before he seeks to assuage his morbid longings by an invasion of the bodies of his forefathers. It would be supposed the sanctity of death and the rest of the grave would naturally be privileged, but no, they have rather stimulated his curiosity, and so have found little or no consideration in his sight. The cunningly-embalmed Egyptian potentate in his burial fortress of the great pyramid,--his humble spice-wound subject in his rock-hewn sepulchre,--the Roman emperor in his grand mausoleum,--Greek hero in costly sarcophagus,--British chieftain in flint-piled barrow,--mediæval saint in shrine, and king, ecclesiastic or noble in their ponderous stone coffins,--all have in turn been subjected to this unfeeling scrutiny, and the poor dust and mouldering bones rummaged over by irreverent hands, very few indeed escaping violation, sometimes for hope of plunder, but usually for idle curiosity, and the indulgence of relic-hunting propensities. And yet, perhaps, there is scarcely anything the living heart would more shrink from contemplating, than the possibility of such indignity being offered to the frail decaying tenement it had beat in, after death; a sentiment shared in common by the greatest intellects and humblest minds,--but that does not avert the outrage.[50]