the use thereof allowable in physic: exceeding the barbarities
of Cambyses, and turning old heroes into unworthy potions. Shall
Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and
Cheops and Psammeticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat
of Chamnes and Amasis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by
cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is miserable vampirism; and
exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled
except in those Arabian feasts wherein ghouls feed horribly.

I need hardly add that the world has come round to the great
physician's way of thinking, and that mummy is not included in the
pharmacopoeia of modern days.

The monumental inscriptions of this country, as a general rule, furnish
lamentable proof of the national bad taste. Somehow our peculiar
genius seems not to lie in that direction; and very eminent men,
who did most other things well, have signally failed when they tried
to produce an epitaph. What with stilted extravagance and bombast
on the one side, and profane and irreverent jesting on the other,
our epitaphs, for the most part, would be better away. It was well
said by Addison of the inscriptions in Westminster Abbey,--'Some
epitaphs are so extravagant that the dead person would blush;
and others so excessively modest that they deliver the character
of the person departed in Greek and Hebrew, and by that means are
not understood once in a twelve-month.' And Fuller has hit the
characteristics of a fitting epitaph when he said that 'the shortest,
plainest, and truest epitaphs are the best.' In most cases the safe
plan is to give no more than the name and age, and some brief text
of Scripture.