“The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented Digby, sunk thee to the grave?
“Tell me, if virtue made the son expire,
Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?”
Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön:
“Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs
Of all his labours, and a life of cares.
Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years,
And leaves the father unavailing tears.
To strangers now descends his heapy store,
The race forgotten, and the name no more.”