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the statue erected a few years since in the Poets' Corner, 

 seems to have arisen, and to have been devoted to his 

 memory, from his Reflections on the Tombs in the Abbey. 

 Those reflections I here subjoin; and I am sure my reader 

 will agree with me, that I could not offer a purer honour to 

 his genius and memory: "No. 26, Friday, March 30. 



Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas 



Regumque turres, O beate sexti. 

 Vitae summa brevis spent nos vetat inchoare longam, 



Jam te premet nox, fabulaeque manes, 

 Et domus exilis Plutonia. HOR. 



With equal foot, rich friend, impartial fate 



Knocks at the cottage, and the palace gate : 



Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares, 



And stretch thy hopes beyond thy tender years: 



Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go 



To storied ghosts, and Pluto 's house below. CREECH. 



" When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by 

 myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the 

 place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity 

 of the building, and the condition of the people who lie hi it, 

 are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather 

 thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed 

 a whole afternoon in the church-yard, the cloisters, and the 

 church, amusing myself with the tomb-stones and inscriptions 

 that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most 

 of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that 

 he was born upon one day and died upon another: the whole 

 history of his life being comprehended in those two circum- 

 stances, that are common to all mankind. I could not but 

 look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or 

 marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons ; who 

 had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born 

 and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons 



