virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred-it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the great assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the drossy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust-the finer and more ethereal part mounts with the winged spirit to watch over our latest memory and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness. Nothing could shew the real superiority of genius in a more striking point of view than the idle contests and the public indifference about the place of Lord Byron's interment, whether in WestminsterAbbey or his own family-vault. A king must have a coronation—a nobleman a funeral-procession. The man is nothing without the pageant. The poet's cemetery is the human mind, in which he sows the seeds of neverending thought-his monument is to be found in his works: 'Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven; No pyramids set off his memory, But the eternal substance of his greatness." Lord Byron is dead: he also died a martyr to his zeal in the cause last, best hopes of man. cuse and his epitaph ! of freedom, for the Let that be his ex |