EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
115 
years of the receiver’s life may be often cheered with the 
pleasing retrospect of the estimation in which he is held by 
his fellow-men. We have known talent to be in want, and 
industry not to meet with its reward in life ; probably from 
some peculiarity or eccentricity in the person possessing the 
one or exercising the other. Genius is often eccentric. Or 
it may be that the endeavours of the individual were ill-timed ; 
he lived before his day, so to speak, and therefore he was not 
duly estimated. Years, however, having rolled on, the things 
which he had proposed were imperatively called for, the wants 
of the community demanded them ; and then was brought to 
remembrance the man who had first suggested them, and with 
this the contumely and neglect in which he was allowed to 
live and die. Shame now hides herself behind a canopied 
mausoleum to his memory, and pride complacently rests 
upon the monument erected to his neglected and too early 
discerning powers. What if the tomb were as munificent as 
that erected by the luxurious monarch Caesar Augustus? Its 
ruins would only in succeeding ages serve to astonish the 
traveller and puzzle the antiquary. Gone like it would be 
its terraces of marble and its groves of evergreens, its mystic 
passages, and its public walks. The inquiry might even 
be made for whom it was erected? for like many of those 
costly structures that now T in a state of dilapidation line the 
Appian way, no inscription would record whose ashes are in- 
urned. 
“ Praises on tombs are idols vainly spent ; 
A good man’s name is his best monument.” 
We are quite aware that there is yet another view which 
may be taken of this subject, namely, the satisfaction afforded 
to his relatives ; and it is only on that ground that we can 
acquiesce in what has been the general custom of mankind. 
Yet here again we see no real objection why the honour should 
not have been conferred while living. This, however, is a 
question of such delicacy that we refrain from entering on its 
consideration, and shall content ourselves by closing our 
remarks with a quotation from a letter that recently appeared 
in the public prints, written by a well-known popular author. 
