endeavoured to disarm the monster Death of his terrors; and in vain have the poets compared the dissolution and total decay of the body to the sweet and calm refreshment of sleep. These false reasonings and visionary views of death, may serve to deceive and lull the infidel, during the seasons of health and prosperity; but nothing further is required, than to visit the burying-places of an infidel people, to convince us that their feelings, on the

death of those to whom they are bound by the ties of natural affection, are not unfrequently of a kind most intolerably afflictive and bit

ter.

There is a remarkable passage in the writings of a celebrated modern author, which strongly tends to confirm this remark; and the more so, because the writer being himself an infidel, while he points out one of the natural effects of infidelity,

appears unable to trace that

effect to its legitimate cause.

This person describes him

self as being in the centre of an ancient burying-ground, and indulging the following train of thoughts.—

66

Weary of my walk, I seated myself behind a vine, upon a stone which was not yet placed in its proper situation, and there yielded my thoughts to that train of melancholy meditations, which

is called by Montaigne a

My first

serious pleasure. reflection led me to ask, wherefore respect for the dead is in all countries in an adverse ratio to the degree of civilization of that country? -in effect, what ceremony, what custom of Europe, can be compared to the funeral devotions of savage people? Those young Canadians, who

wash with their milk the tombs of their infants-those widows of Florida, who despoil themselves every year

of their hair, in order to adorn the pyramidical busts under which are buried the bodies of their husbandsthose inhabitants of the shores of the Oroonoko, who preserve with so much care the skeletons of their fathers, which they adorn with feathers, with bracelets, and necklaces-all of these afford images totally differing from the cold obsequies in use among civilized people. 1 called to mind the tombs of the Turks, and of the