Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper burying-ground he was now going for interment). All which when I behelde, hardly I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: "If this man had been rich, a _Crœsus_, a _Crassus, or as rich as Whittington_, what pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall, _ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies_, had been thought too good for such an one; what store of panegyricks, elogies, funeral orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite, learned, _a Mæcenas_, while as in very deede he was nothing lesse: what weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, kinsmen, friends, relatives, fortieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased; hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts, (they care not if he had died a year ago); so many clients, dependants, flatterers, _parasites, cunning Gnathoes_, tramping on foot after the hearse, all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the successour; he mean time (like enough) spurns them from him, spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the right: _Hæc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. The follies are enough to give crying Heraclitus a fit of the spleene._ * * * * * EARLY JOURNALISM I.--G. F. COOKE IN "RICHARD THE THIRD" (1802) Some few of us remember to have _seen_, and all of us have heard our fathers tell of Quin, and Garrick, and Barry, and some faint traditional notices are left us of their manner in particular scenes, and their stile of delivering certain emphatic sentences. Hence our curiosity is excited, when a _new Hamlet_ or a _new Richard_ makes his appearance, in the first place, to inquire, how he acted in the _Closet scene_, in the _Tent scene_; how he looked, and how he started, when the _Ghost_ came on, and how he cried Off with his head. So much for Buckingham. We do not reprehend this minute spirit of comparison. On the contrary, we consider it as a delightful artifice, by which we connect the recreations of the past with those of the present generation, what pleased our fathers with what pleases us. We love to witness the obstinate attachments, the unconquerable prejudices (as they seem to us), of the old men, our seniors, the whimsical gratification they appear to derive from the very refusal to be gratified; to hear them talk of the good _old_ actors, whose race is for ever extinct.