confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all become confounded in my
recollection, tho I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold.
What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchers but a treasury of
humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown
and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of death; his
great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of
human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of
princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time
is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the
story of the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes that gave
interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily
forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our
recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of
to-morrow.

"Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short
memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors."
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy;
the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the
pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and
their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is the security
of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander
the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is
now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses
or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth; Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsams." [Footnote: Sir Thomas Browne.]

What, then, is to insure this pile which now towers above me from sharing
the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its gilded
vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath the