“Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”
And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork,
“Even so must I run on, and even so stop.”
In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian’s trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when he thus addresses the frivolous fair of his day: “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most High.... But, O gods of flesh and blood, O gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall fall to the ground, veruntamen sicut homines moriemini.” This is in Tertullian’s description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty. Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir Joshua Reynolds’s picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached, Et in Arcadiâ ego. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: “He saw it yesterday, and said at once, ‘Oh, there is a tombstone in the background. Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’” The thought is said to have been borrowed from Poussin—where some gay revellers stumble over a death’s head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ ego.
Memorable at Saladin’s banquet to Richard and his peers—ever memorable among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, “the banner of Death, with this impressive inscription—‘Saladin, King of Kings—Saladin, Victor of Victors—Saladin must Die.’”
Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the British monarch, to whom he is addressing his carmen seculare for the year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh:
“But a relentless destiny
Urges all that e’er was born:
Snatch’d from her arms, Britannia once must mourn