BY FAMOUS GRAVES

N life, the great are the companions of a few;

IN

in death they become the possession of the

many. Is not this the secret of that charm which attracts so many thousands to the restingplaces of illustrious men? There is a satisfaction in standing close by the side of those who have ministered to our imaginative life, even though it be but their dust to which we draw

near.

This after-death homage is one of the compensations of genius. How many there have been who have enriched the world with fair thoughts and melodious songs out of a life spent in poverty, neglect, and sorrow. It was not given them in life to enter into the heritage of a people's love; is it idle to think that in death they are conscious of the affection which we feel to-day as we stand beside their graves? Some of the great dead had their meed of responsive love in life, and it is pleasant to think that their passing into the silent land may not

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have broken the continuity of their reward. Washington Irving observed that visitors to Westminster Abbey remained longest amid the memorials in Poets' Corner. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language."

As there are few countries which have so many famous graves as England, so are there none of

the earth's great dead who have more pilgrims to their shrines than those who have clothed their thoughts in the English tongue. There are solitary great graves in the world, such as Dante's, which are cosmopolitan in their interest; but in English soil is buried a vast army of immortals who are the common possession and glory of two great peoples. And there are no more faithful pilgrims to the famous graves of England than those who journey from the Republic of the West; their devotion to the memory of the illustrious dead often puts to shame the forgetfulness or apathy of those native to the land in which they rest.

Although the grave of Laurence Sterne is within a stone's throw of one of the most crowded thoroughfares of London, there are few save Americans who turn aside from the stream of life in Bayswater Road to gaze upon his resting-place in the St. George's burial-ground. He had boasted in "Tristram Shandy" that his preference would be to die in an inn, untroubled by the presence and services of his friends; yet when, in his London lodgings, he began to realize that death might be near, he pined for his daughter Lydia to nurse him. Only a hired nurse and a footman stood by Sterne's death

bed. The latter had been sent to inquire after the health of the famous author, and, being told by the landlady of the house to go upstairs and see for himself, he reached the deathchamber just as Sterne was passing away. Putting up his hand as though to ward off a blow, he ejaculated, 'Now it is come," and so died. The story goes that even as he was dying, the nurse was busy possessing herself of the gold sleeve-links from his wrists.

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Despite the fame he had won, only two mourners followed Sterne to his grave. But other eyes, it seems, watched the burial; for it is affirmed that two days later the body was taken from the grave and sold to a professor of anatomy for dissection. Only an accident revealed the identity of the "subject." Happening to have some friends visiting him at the time, the professor invited them to witness a demonstration, and on their following him to his surgery one of them was horrified to recognize in the partially dissected corpse the features of his friend Laurence Sterne. Such is the story, and most authorities agree in thinking it likely to be true. Perhaps it was not unknown to the two masons who erected the first stone over the grave, for their inscription began with the significant words,