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black: (one of these reported the deceased to have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper buryingground he was now going for interment). All which when I behelde, hardly I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: "If this man had been rich, a Cræsus, a Crassus, or as rich as Whittington, what pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies, had been thought too good for such an one; what store of panegyricks, elogies, funeral orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite, learned, a Macenas, while as in very deede he was nothing lesse: what weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, kinsmen, friends, relatives, fourtieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased; hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts, (they care not if he had died a year ago); so many clients, dependants, flatterers, parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after the hearse, all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the successour; he mean

time (like enough) spurns them from him, spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the right: Hæc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. These follies are enough to give crying Heraclitus a fit of the spleene.

ROSAMUND GRAY.

A TALE.

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