THE FINE ARTS IN CONNECTION WITH DEATH. It is a study worthy of the curious to mark how different ages have treated artistically the great deliverer or the great foe of the human race-Death; the dark term of the avenue of life, where the perspective lines of our passage through it terminate-some bowing down and burning incense to it; others, in the disgust it inspires, reviling it; whilst most nations have called in the aid of the fine arts to perpetuate the remembrance of a beloved object. The pagans of antiquity were afraid of it, they concealed and veiled it; the Greek sculptor chiselled the dying Daphne, from Carrara marble, with the paleness but not the rigidity of death. In the patrician house, the descendant of the Lepides and the Scipios had his chamber of ancestors: there masks of wax, visible through glass cases, showed him, with the appearance of life, the series of his ancestors. At the larval festivals, or on any historical anniversary, each of these waxen figures was adorned with a wig, and crowned, according to its rank, with the priestly bandeau or military laurel. The descendants, or others who took part in the carousals, put on the masks, clothed themselves in a costume suitable to the period, and the cortége, formed under the atrium of the patrician's house, marched in procession to the Forum. The Greeks, with that passion for beauty in its outward form, as revealing the inward culture and life of the soul, regarded death as a victory over the sorrows and misfortunes of this world; hence, they wove crowns for the corpse, which was to be carried in sad triumph to the grave, wreathing flowers and grass with bands of wool. The dress was formed of the most costly material that the relatives could afford to purchase. The body, anointed with the valuable scents and unguents of antiquity and strewed with flowers, received a honey-cake in one hand, to quiet the dog Cerberus, and an obol (a silver coin worth about three-halfpence) to pay Charon for ferrying him over the Styx in his boat; whilst the laments of the relatives were mingled with the songs of the hired mourners, who accompanied their wail with the flute. After two days the body was burnt on a huge pyre, around which were placed jars of oil and honey, that the flames might the sooner complete their work; the favourite animals belonging to the dead, such as his horses and dogs, shared the fate of their master, and in earlier times his captive slaves. He who was the chief mourner was obliged to remain as long as the fire burnt, pouring wine over it, and calling aloud on the friend who was gone. A sacrifice, prayers, and a banquet closed the scene. The bones were then collected, and Greek art was expended on the receptacle in which these were placed. Achilles gathered together the ashes of Patroclus into an urn of gold wrapped round with fine linen; whilst the Trojans buried their dead in a casket wrapped in purple cloth, and lowered into a grave, over which large stones were placed, or a mound of earth. The Greeks generally added an inscribed stone or a statue, which, in the case of unmarried women, always carried a pitcher of water, symbolical of the bridal bath. The exquisite vases, many of which remain as eternal records of beauty, were generally provided in youth, when the ceremony of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries took place. The advantages which these neophytes would receive in a future life were largely dwelt on: they would have the seats of honour when others would lie in the mud; and hence all the Athenians were ready to accept the union with the Gods, and received the funeral urn as a credential of what they had passed through; the graceful fancy of the sculptor thus entwining itself round all that there is of serious and solemn in death. These rites only belonged to the rich the poor laid their dead on the ground, not in it, and raised a mound of earth over it. Other nations exposed the corpses to the atmosphere, permitting the unclean hirds of the air to banquet on their remains; or, like the Hindoos, committed them to the waters to be floated wherever the tide flowed. As regards one nation of antiquity, the conformation of the soil had the greatest influence on the civilization of the people, and the splendid monuments to the dead in Egypt were due, in a great measure, to the narrow valley which constituted the kingdom, and the periodical overflowing of the Nile. There is no more remarkable feature in this civilization than their worship of the tombs; the process of embalming, and funeral ceremonies. Above all things they could not bear the idea of human decomposition; the river prevented the burial of the dead, and their reason for embalming may have arisen as much from attention to public health, as from their religious belief in the metempsychosis of souls. Certain it is that, when Christianity brought into Egypt a purer morality, it endowed it at the same time with the plague, by substituting a new mode of inhumation to that which the sagacity of the Pharonaic priests had judged necessary, and which the experience of ages had consecrated. It appears that the plague was unknown in ancient Egypt, the salubrity of which was much praised by historians: the year 543 saw the first attack, which ravaged Europe: since then it has lingered on the shores of the Nile, as the cholera does on those of the Ganges. In the wonderful frescoes, which the dryness of the climate has preserved to us in all their perfection, we see the fine arts used to com in the creations of Christian artists during the memorate the whole process after death: the painter tracing the features of the dead on the coffin-like box which enclosed the mummy, the apprentice rubbing the colours, the potter moulding the vases, in which were preserved the relics of the body, showing the extreme care with which the Egyptians watched over the integrity of the body. When the swathing was completed the priests carried it back to the parents: they had received a corpse, they restored to them a statue: it was drawn on a little stage to the altar, on which were placed offerings of bread, vases for libation, and baskets of grapes. In another picture the mummy is standing in a moveable chapel with foldingdoors, before which the priest reads prayers, and the relatives give themselves up to lamentations. After this domestic mourning came the funeral; the feasts; the dances performed by young girls scarcely veiled; the procession, in which the priests carry the vases holding the viscera, ser-ishment, and the death's head, became decoravants loaded with offerings or things dear to tions or jewels delicately carved in ivory, silver, the departed one; then a juvenile group of the or enamelled gold; and terminated the chapweepers, enveloped in long white robes, their let of beads which hung to the young lady's hair covered with blue powder; and, finally, the girdle. Death was sculptured on the porch catafalque placed on a sledge in the shape of a and painted on the stained-glass windows of boat-a form which it is not surprising they churches, astride the white horse of the should choose, since the Egyptians owed all Apocalypse; the thighs bare and brown like a their fertility to the Nile. On reaching the mummy's, the hair flying back, a sneering exbanks of that river all embark, stopping at the pression in the toothless jaws, and with a bier entrance of the hypogeum, and the mummy is under its fleshless arm. Yet no terror in the placed in the subterranean hall, which is to be minds of the men of those days exiled or reexplored many years after by curious travellers, pelled it from their homes; the cemetery and who cannot but admire the system of sepulchral the house were joined together under the shaexcavation, which served as a model for Arabia, dow of the parish church. At the time when Judea, Persia, Nineveh, Babylon, and Etruria, Louis, Duke of Orleans, was assassinated by the magnificent hieroglyphics attesting the Jean Sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, their splendour of the fine arts under the reigns of the cousin the Duke de Berri, a lover of art in Pharaohs. Nor is the painter's task ended buildings and ornaments, gave orders for a great when the final resting-place is reached: a scene work in the charnel-house of the Innocents at beyond the grave appears, in which the great Paris. It was the legend of the three dead and judge Sesostris, armed with a whip of three the three living carved in stone. Three gay cords, is seated on his throne, assisted by forty-young men set out on horseback to hunt, with two others with heads of crocodiles, hawks, jackals, and serpents. Before them stands a table loaded with the offerings of the dead, the Egyptian Cerberus standing as if waiting for a sign from the god. A most curious part of the scene is the symbolical judgment of the soul expressed by the picture of a large balance, in which Horus and Anubis weigh it. In one scale is the heart of the departed; in the other a weight under the form of the God-one more ancient, more celebrated, and by an dess of Justice-a headless woman, with a bunch of feathers on her shoulder; yet in the midst of this serious affair the artist has depicted Death weighing down the balance with both hands in her favour, the Gods paying no attention to this subterfuge, but reporting the result to Osiris on a written tablet. If all be right the soul is at once admitted to Paradise; but if guilty it descends into the circles of hell, a primordial type of Dante's Inferno. The punishments of these places of darkness are figured on the Egyptian monuments a thousand years before the Christian era, with that fecundity of horrible and fantastic invention which is found the falcon on their wrist; they meet three hideous skeletons, who begin to speak to them; a hermit joins the party, and, in a learned sermon, explains to the three first the vanity of human life. But the most popular picture of death in the middle-ages was the Dance of Death. Hans Holbein, with all the point and talent of his pencil, painted it at Basle. The cemetery of the Innocents in Paris possessed unknown artist. It was really a dance, a branle, or a cotillon, in which, turn by turn, a cavalier and a lady took part, the lady leading. All passed by her, from the least to the greatest, and she was Death. Rank took its proper precedence-first the Pope, then the Emperor, kings, prelates, patriarchs, cardinals, clergy, mitred abbots, priors, simple monks; then came the landed proprietor, the soldier, the physician, the judge, the merchant, the humble labourer following in the rear. The living cohorts, the dance of the world defiled before this panorama, this mirror; scarcely could the malicious spirit of the painted picture console the actors in the animated scene: it was like a rough sketch of the last judgment-justice mixed with irony. Not very dissimilar in spirit to this was a celebrated picture, in the Marien Kirche, of the old free city of Lubeck; it also was about thirtyfive years older than that of Hans Holbein, but here each figure, from the old man to the babe, had for its partner a ghastly skeleton-a horrible subject, but very naturally arising from the cloister-life and ascetic taste which characterized the dark ages, making the skeleton in the cupboard an everyday spectacle. Parliament held the pall, surrounded by the The brave nation of the Gauls adored Death; they sought it with avidity in battle, actuated not by their piety only, but by a lofty pride. "Their wise men," said they, "taught them this truth, that man does not perish, and that virtue is a mistletoe that is ever green." Their descendants the French long retained a singular custom: they carried their relatives to the tomb, laid in their state beds, which were left there to become the perquisite of the officiating priest. The mourners were led and supported under their affliction by the jongleurs, male and female-hired minstrels, who bore by no means the best of characters, but were always present at all births, marriages, and deaths. In concert they tore their hair, scratched their faces, rent their clothes, and, throwing themselves on the ground, filled the air with dismal cries. In the end a law was passed which put an end to these unseemly demonstrations. The burials of the early kings of France present some singular features. The body of the departed monarch, after being embalmed with sweet spices and herbs, was exposed in the chapel of the royal residence for one day, with the face uncovered; after which it was enclosed in a lead coffin for three weeks: during this time the clergy of all the churches in Paris came alternately to celebrate mass and the other offices for the dead. St. Denis being the burial-place for the royal family, a litter was made for the coffin, which would draw together when it had to pass through the narrow streets of the ancient city, and enlarge again when greater space permitted. The litter was carried by hand: it was about six feet in height, covered with a carpet of cloth-of-gold, bordered with blue velvet, and spotted with fleurs-de-lis. Seated on this was a figure of the king dressed in the then fashionable cóte-hardi, and a mantle of cloth-of-gold lined with ermine. The chausses, or stockings which covered the whole leg, were of blue silk, with fleurs-de-lis woven in: the hands, encased in white gloves, held the golden sceptre and rod of justice, and the crown was on his head—a sad mockery of power that had During the reign of Henry the Fourth, we find for ever passed away. Thus it was borne by a record of his wearing fine black cloth for nine the grooms of the stable and of the gate to the days after the death of his beloved Gabrielle cathedral of Notre-Dame, they groaning d'Estrées, changing for the usual Court mournunder the heavy burden, which weighed not lessing of purple velvet during three months. This than fourteen hundred pounds. The canopy of cloth-of-gold was carried by the Provost and Sheriffs, and when they were weary the principal burgesses of the city took charge of it. Arrayed in scarlet mantles the Presidents of the There is nothing in which greater variation among nations has occurred than in the colours they have worn as a token of their sorrow for the departed. It would seem as if black (the colour now chiefly used by European nations) was first introduced by the Spaniards. Peter the Venerable, writing in 1180, regarded it as a singularity in France: "The good and wise Sidoine, Bishop of Auvergne," he remarks, "laughed at all those who went to a funeral in a white dress, and to a marriage in a black one. For those who follow the custom of his country wear black when mourning, and I myself in my journey through Spain saw with astonishment that this usage was generally observed there. If a Spaniard loses his wife, son, or father, he lays aside his arms, silk-dresses, and stuffs of various colours, to clothe himself with black serge." Rabelais speaks of green having been used in France, but white was more general; the Queen Dowager always bore the name of La Reine Blanche, and used to retire to the Hotel de Cluny for her year's withdrawal from society, where she was habited in white. colour is also worn by the cardiaals in the Church of Rome, whilst yellow is chosen by the Egyptians, the Quiches of Guatemala, and some Asiatic nations. The Turks wear blue, a dark shade of which is patronized in Elmina, and 294 SAILS THE SEA." BY WILLIAM E. PABOR. added to black among the Quichans. White | "SMOOTH GLIDES THE SHIP THAT prevails among the Chinese, Anamese, and Siamese; and the Australian, despising clothing, paints his body the same colour, or draws a white line across his forehead, nose, or cheeks. The Persians wear brown, the Peruvians grey, the North Americans black. Thus it is a matter of perfect indifference, fashion being the guide in this country, where violet, grey, scarlet, and black, all indicate the different shades of feeling, "NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP." In the quiet nursery chambers, Snowy pillows yet unpressed, See the forms of little children, Kneeling, white-robed, for their rest. All in quiet nursery chambers, While the dusky shadows creep, Hear the voices of the children, "Now I lay me down to sleep." In the meadow and the mountain Darkness growing still more deep, "If we die" -so pray the children, And the mother's head drops low (One, from out her fold, is sleeping Deep beneath the winter's snow,) "Take our souls:" and past the casement Little souls, that stand expectant, Of the tumult and the strife; In your simple vesper prayer. When your hands shall grasp the standard Pray to him, the God of battles, Whose strong arm can never sleep, In the warring of temptation Firm and true your souls to keep. When the combat ends, and slowly Clears the smoke from out the skies, Smooth glides the ship that sails the sea, So life-like is her look to me. And faint and far-off echoes reach Her decks, as down the tide she goes: Until below the horizon Her white sails dip and disappear, And if our life is like the ship, Pray God to send us kindly gales, And from the breakers and the sand, FIRST LOVE. BY ADA TREVANION. I did not know till he was gone, All things spoke to me of my loss, And when I knelt before the cross, I heard the birds and waters sing, No discipline is more necessary to children than that of patience; becanse either the will must be broken in childhood, or the heart in old age. REFORM.-He who reforms himself has done more toward reforming the public than a crowd of noisy impotent patriots, "THE BRITISH MERLIN" of Justice, 1648;" on the 23rd, "The third time," and on the 25th "K. C. brought the last time before the High Court of Justice, sentenced to die, 1648," while the next day's record is "A scaffold erected at Whitehall, 1648," and is succeeded by the next-" K. C. beheaded 1648." I do not know that any period of English ("King Ch. the second time before the H. Court history is more full of interest to us than the period succeeding the death of Charles I. The uprooting (though only to be replanted more firmly) of the ancient landmarks and institu- | tions of the realm, the predominance of the stern Puritans and the broken and baffled condition of the Cavaliers, all present to the mind a vague but enthralling picture of our England resting after years of civil war. A little lantern often throws powerful light. Similarly, from a little book in my possession and now lying on the desk before me, I think an interesting and vivid picture may be sketched of the English interior life in 1653. In the month of February we find, on the 6th, the brief record: "House of Lords vot. down 1648," and on the 7th, "Kingly office likewise, 1648;" while on the next day is recorded, "Rebellion of the old Earl of Essex, 1601." On the 10th it seems was "K. C. interred at Windsor, 1648," while on the 16th 24th "Essex lost his head, 1601" (brief record of a chequered history!), and on the 25th is found "An Act enjoyning Papists and Cavaliers to depart London, and twenty miles distant, by the 20th of March following, 1649." The little volume, bound in dusky parchment," K. C. brought to Holmby, 1646." On the or vellum rather, and printed in strange type, must have seen many vicissitudes. Two hundred and fourteen years have rolled away since it saw the light, and king after king has filled that "kingly office" which it records as "voted down," and now it exists as a voice from the past, reflecting in its pages the ghosts of men and things. Its title-page (alternating in red and black ink) declares it to be "Merlinus CambroBritannus; or, "The British Merlin,' demonstrating the true Revolution of the Year, the Mutation and State of Weather (of which the nation had good experience last year), Chronological Observations of most notable Concurrences past to this present time, 1653, Notes of Husbandry: with many necessary Tables, for such as use Marts and Fairs; also for Travellers that coast the Commonwealth; with other Notes of good consequence." And it is "Made and Compiled by the Lover of his Country and Art, Schardanus Riders" (which I presume to be a cryptogram for Richard Sanders). "London: Printed by John Field, 1653." We first come on tables of weights, measures, and Sundays, chronology and interest; and then, after a curious plate of the "Anatomy of man's body, as the parts thereof are governed by the twelve Celestial Signs," we come to the interesting part of the book-the monthly calendars, guides to husbandry, weather prophecies, and jottings of historical occurrences most interesting to the reader. Under the head of January, "the good husband" is told to " prune superfluous branches from fruit-trees, uncover their roots; set all kinds of quicksets and fruit-trees in the New of the Moon, the winde and weather observed; as also set Beans, Pease, and Parsnips, the weather milde and Moon decreasing." The records for the month tell us inter alia that on the 14th the Archbishop of Canterbury was beheaded 1644, and on the 18th "King Charles brought to St. James's, 1648, thence to the H. Court of Justice, 1648," and on the 21st In March the first entry that meets the reader's eye is "Lord Capel, Camb., Holland beheaded, 1648." This is on the 9th. On the 16th we see "And Earl of Norwich and Sir John Owen reprieved, 1648;" on 20th "Cavaliers depart London, 1648;" on 26th "Act for Redemption of Captives, 1650;" on 29th "L. Crom. made General of Ireland, 1649, and L. Fairfax of England and Ireland, 1649." On the 9th April is recorded "Act for assessing £90,000 per mensem for maintaining the Armies, 1649." "On the 13th "The form of the New Mace agreed on, 1649;" on the 20th "Duke of York fled from St. Iames 1649," and 23rd "Monethly fast null'd 1649," while on 27th "King Charles fled, disguised, from Oxford, 1646." May is marked by "The 3rd day Cheapside Cross demolished 1643." Passing on to the 12th, we see recorded "Earl of Strafford beheaded 1641." On the 24th "Kentish Insurrection 1648," and 29th "Act for abolishing Kingly Government proclaimed 1648." June introduces us, on the 9th, to "Col. Goring at Bow 1648," and on the 14th to "The Lord Fairfax's memorable Victory at Naseby, 1645," and on the 26th day L. Cromwel made General 1650," while on the 25th our chronicler says "This day last year, 1652, never let be forgotte for those strange pieces of ice that fell at thunder for many days wherein many were Greenwich and other places and that continued slain." July records on "The first day K. C. brought On the 27th, "Bristol. to Windsor, 1647.” taken by Prince Rupert, 1644." August records inter alia, on the 14th, "Society of Astrologers;" on the 15th, “K. C. brought to Oatlands, 1647;" and on the 21st, |