aggravating affliction remains, that it was not our lot to watch over your
sick-bed, to support you when languishing, and to satiate ourselves with
beholding and embracing you. With what attention should we have received
your last instructions, and engraven them on our hearts! This is our
sorrow; this is our wound: to us you were lost four years before by a
tedious absence. Everything, doubtless, O best of parents! was
administered for your comfort and honor, while a most affectionate wife
sat beside you; yet fewer tears were shed upon your bier, and in the last
light which your eyes beheld, something was still wanting.

46. If there be any habitation for the shades of the virtuous; if, as
philosophers suppose, exalted souls do not perish with the body; may you
repose in peace, and call us, your household, from vain regret and
feminine lamentations, to the contemplation of your virtues, which allow
no place for mourning or complaining! Let us rather adorn your memory by
our admiration, by our short-lived praises, and, as far as our natures
will permit, by an imitation of your example. This is truly to honor the
dead; this is the piety of every near relation. I would also recommend it
to the wife and daughter of this great man, to show their veneration of a
husband's and a father's memory by revolving his actions and words in
their breasts, and endeavoring to retain an idea of the form and features
of his mind, rather than of his person. Not that I would reject those
resemblances of the human figure which are engraven in brass or marbles
but as their originals are frail and perishable, so likewise are they:
while the form of the mind is eternal, and not to be retained or expressed
by any foreign matter, or the artist's skill, but by the manners of the
survivors. Whatever in Agricola was the object of our love, of our
admiration, remains, and will remain in the minds of men, transmitted in
the records of fame, through an eternity of years. For, while many great
personages of antiquity will be involved in a common oblivion with the