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mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who have sounding 

 names given them, for no other reason but that they may be 

 killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on 

 the head. 



Glaucumque, Medontaque, Thersilochumque. VIRG. 



" The life of these men is finely described in holy writ by 

 the path of an arrow, which is immediately closed up and lost. 

 Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with 

 the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovel-full of it that 

 was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed 

 with a kind of fresh mouldering earth that some time or other 

 had a place in the composition of an human body. Upon 

 this I began to consider with myself what innumerable multi- 

 tudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of 

 that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and 

 enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were 

 crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the 

 same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with 

 old age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the 

 same promiscuous heap of matter. After having thus sur- 

 veyed this great magazine of mortality, as it were in the 

 lump; I examined it more particularly by the accounts which 

 I found on several of the monuments which are raised in 

 every quarter of that ancient fabrick. Some of them were 

 covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that if it were possi- 

 ble for the dead person to be acquainted with them, ;he 

 would blush at the praises which his friends have bestowed 

 upon him. There are others so excessively modest, that 

 they deliver the character of the person departed in Greek 

 or Hebrew, and by that means are not understood once in a 

 twelvemonth. In the poetical quarter, I found there were 

 poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no 

 poets. I observed indeed that the present war had filled the 



