I ask this question with due consideration for the feelings of a dead man. I know it is an unpleasant thing to be a dead man. There are no corner-lots, no operas, no new novels, no latest styles, no duck-shooting, no sensations on the other bank of the Styx.
I never appreciated that poet who would not live always. I would.
Neither that other poet who wanted to die in the summer time. I am so little particular about the time, as to prefer not to die at any time.
Neither those gushing young women who pine for a willow tree, with a nightingale "into it," at the headboard, and trim daisies at the foot-board.
My sepulchro-botanical yearnings are overpowered by a very strong friendship for this superb old world.
Which reminds me to again ask the question: Has a live man any rights which a dead man is bound to respect?
And this suggests, first, Tombstones.
I am prepared to make a wager with any responsible party that in a match for the championship of lying, a tombstone would beat Ananias with Sapphira thrown in, and will give odds. Hic jacet is literally true, and about the only true thing the majority of tombstones say. If the ghosts of the late deceased—who are always eminent—are permitted to stroll about cemeteries at their leisure, their astonishment at reading their epitaphs must be of the most supernatural character.
A miser, whose small soul in his earthly life could not have been found with a microscope, is astonished to discover, that he was a liberal-hearted man and a benefactor, with distant allusions to the possibility of his having been an angel in disguise.
A man who went through the world without the responsibility of a single moral principle under his vest, suddenly finds that he was possessed of all the cardinal virtues, and is written down on cool marble as an exemplar for the rising generation.