"This statue in the meantime has been gradually coming back to life through a curious series of transitions. The Vendramin monument is one of the last which shows, or pretends to show, the recumbent figure laid in death. A few years later this idea became disagreeable to polite minds; and lo! the figures which before had been laid at rest upon the tomb pillow, raised themselves on their elbows, and began to look around them. The soul of the sixteenth century dared not contemplate its body in death."
Flaxman, in his remarks on the monuments of Aylmer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback in Westminster Abbey, admires
"The solemn repose of the principal figure, representing the deceased in his last prayer for mercy to the throne of grace, the delicacy of thought in the group of angels bearing the soul, and the tender sentiment of concern variously expressed in the relations ranged in order round the basement."
As, however, a canopy on the former exhibits a living figure of the departed on horseback, such as Mr. Ruskin notices in Italy, and as the angels are said to bear the soul, the knight must certainly have breathed his last. The raised hands are no refutation of the argument, since there are grounds for the assertion that those of the dead bodies laid in state were sometimes tied together to retain them in the suitable position. A few exceptional instances, no doubt, occur of variations in the attitude irreconcileable with death, and equally inconsistent with a reclining posture. It must also be admitted that in brasses and incised slabs (which may be regarded in many respects as parallel memorials), the eyes are almost invariably unclosed; yet the fact, neither in this case nor in that of the carved marble, does not by any means certify that the individuals are alive.
Since then there is so much reason for the supposition that the generality of our ancestors are sculptured in the sleep of death, the recumbent figure of a Christian clasping the Bible, and slightly turning his head, just passed away into another state of existence (not into purgatory,
but into a happier world), cannot surely be now deemed unsuitable to a Gothic church.
C. T.
QUERIES ON SOUTH'S SERMONS.
I should be glad to know the authority for the following statement in South's sermon, Against long Extempore Prayers, vol. i. p. 251., Tegg's edition, 1843: