So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, muses in Death’s cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the “unfashionable worm,” respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow and the cheek’s bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast—on what? “No matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,—it is his dinner-time.” The final residuum of such repasts becomes an unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a tone and to a tune like this:
“Did she live yesterday, or ages back?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,
Poor little head! that long has done with aching?”
Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that of Helen. “Was it for this,”[11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull, and not its delicate covering.
Where, asks the author of “Esmond,” are those jewels now that beamed under Cleopatra’s forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr. Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once covered that ghastly yellow framework. “They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones.” And has not Macaulay his “Sermon in a Churchyard”? wherein one practical improvement of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus:—
“Dost thou beneath the smile or frown
Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
Here take thy stand, and trample down