ing-place of Joshua, in the borders of his possessions; and also agreeable unto Roman practice to bury by high-ways, whereby their monuments were under eye: memorials of themselves, and mementos of mortality into living passengers; whom the epitaphs of great ones were fain to beg to stay and look upon them; a language, though sometimes used, not so proper in church-inscriptions. (116) The sensible rhetoric of the dead, to exemplarity of good life, first admitted the bones of pious men and martyrs within church walls; which, in succeeding ages, crept into promiscuous practice. While Constantine was peculiarly favoured to be admitted into the church-porch; and the first thus buried in England was in the days of Cuthred.(117)

Christians dispute how their bodies should lie in the grave.(118) In urnal interment they clearly escaped this controversy: though we decline the religious consideration, yet in cemeterial and narrover burying-places, to avoid confusion and cross position, a certain posture were to be admitted; (119) which even pagan civility observed; the Persians lay north and south, the Megarians (120) and

(116) Siste viator.

(117) On the margin of the copy I print from, a Mr. Joseph Brown, contemporary, apparently, with the author, has this note : "Cuthred first buried in a church in England." He supposes the practice to have commenced with Cuthred's own funeral, not in "his days."-Ed.

(18) Kirckmannus de Funer.

(19) Vide Næn. Britan. The tumuli lie north and south.DOUGLAS.

(120) Here Sir Thomas Browne is wrong in confounding the

Phoenicians placed their heads to the east; the Athenians, some think, towards the west, which Christians still retain. And Beda will have it to be the posture of our Saviour. That he was crucified with his face towards the west, we will not contend with tradition and probable account; but we applaud not the hand of the painter, in exalting his cross so high above those on either side; since hereof we find no authentic account in history, and even the crosses found by Helena pretend no such distinction from longitude or dimension.

To be knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations, escaped in burning burials.

Urnal interments and burnt relics lie not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for serpents; in carnal sepulture corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of snakes out of the spinalmarrow. But, while we suppose common worms in graves, it is not easy to find any there; few in church-yards above a foot deep, fewer or none in churches, though in fresh decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to

Phoenician with the Megarean practice; for, while the former was to place their dead looking toward the west,-πí dúoiv, Schol. Thucyd. I.5.vol. V. 309, 381.--the latter observed no certain rule: wÇ ËTνXE TεDаμμέvovç. Ælian. Var. Hist. VII. 19. This same writer represents the Athenians as burying their dead with their faces towards the west, V. 14. Diog. Laert. in Vit. Solon. I. 2., states the contrary, and he is supported by the Scholiast on Thucydides.-Ed.

corruption. In an hydropical body, ten years buried in a church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of the hardest Castile-soap; whereof part remaineth with us. After a battle with the Persians, the Roman corpses decayed in few days, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, nor bones equally moulder; whereof in the opprobrious disease we expect no long duration. The body of the Marquess of Dorset seemed sound and handsomely cereclothed, that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted. (1) Common tombs preserve not beyond powder: a firmer consistence and compage of parts might be expected from arefaction, deep burial, or charcoal. The greatest antiquities of mortal bodies may remain in petrified bones, whereof, though we take not in the pillar of Lot's wife, or metamorphosis of Ortellius, (122) some may be older than pyramids, in the petrified relics of the general inundation. When Alexander opened the tomb of Cyrus, the remaining bones discovered his proportion, whereof urnal fragments afford but a bad conjecture, and have

(121) Of Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, whose body, being buried 1530, was, 1608, upon the cutting open of the cerecloth, found perfect and nothing corrupted, the flesh not hardened, but in colour, proportion, and softness, like an ordinary corpse newly to be interred. Burton's Description of Leicestershire. (122) In his Map of Russia.

this disadvantage of grave interments, that they leave us ignorant of most personal discoveries. For, since bones afford not only rectitude and stability, but figure unto the body, it is no impossible physiognomy to conjecture at fleshy appendencies; and after what shape the muscles and carnous parts might hang in their full consistences. A full-spread Cariola shows a well-shaped horse behind; handsome formed skulls give some analogy of fleshy resemblance. A critical view of bones makes a good distinction of sexes. Even colour is not beyond conjecture, since it is hard to be deceived in the distinction of Negroes' skulls. Dante's characters (123) are to be found in skulls as well as faces. Hercules is not only known by his foot other parts make out their comproportions, and inferences upon whole or parts. And, since the dimensions of the head measure the whole body, and the figure thereof gives conjecture of the principal faculties, physiognomy outlives ourselves, and ends not in our graves.

Severe contemplators, observing these lasting relics, may think them good monuments of persons past, little advantage to future beings. And, considering that Power which subdueth all things

(123) The poet Dante, in his view of purgatory, found gluttons so meagre and extenuated, that he conceived them to have been in the siege of Jerusalem, and that it was easy to have discovered Homo, or Omo, in their faces: M being made by the two lines of their cheeks, arching over the eye-brows to the nose, and their sunk eyes making O O, which makes up Omo. "Parean l'occhiaie anella senza gemme che nel viso de gli huomini legge huomo Ben'hauria quiui conosciuto l'emme."

uto itself, that can resume the scattered atoms, or identify out of any thing, conceive it superfluous to expect a resurrection out of relics. But the soul subsisting, other matter clothed with due accidents may salve the individuality; yet the saints, we observe, arose from graves and monuments about the holy city. Some think the ancient patriarchs so earnestly desired to lay their bones in Canaan, as hoping to make a part of that resurrection, and, though thirty miles from Mount Calvary, at least to lie in that region which should produce the first-fruits of the dead. And if, according to learned conjecture, the bodies of men shall rise where their greatest relics remain, (124) many are not like to err in the topography of their resurrection, though their bones or bodies be after translated by angels into the field of Ezekiel's vision, or, as some will order it, into the Valley of Judgment, or Jehosaphat.

CHAPTER IV.

CHRISTIANS have handsomely glossed the deformity of death, by careful consideration of the body, and civil rites which take off brutal terminations. And, though they conceived all reparable by a resurrec

(124) Tirin. in Ezek.