Note 37 — English Authors on Gardening.
Reading edition
These lines are from him, at whose death (says Sir W. Scott in his generous and glowing eulogy) we were stunned "by one of those death-notes which are peeled at intervals, as from an archangel's trumpet"—they are from "that mighty genius which walked amongst men as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or evil"—they are from "that noble tree which will never more bear fruit, or blossom! which has been cut down in its strength, and the past is all that remains to us of Byron: whose excellences will now be universally acknowledged, and his faults (let us hope and believe) not remembered in his epitaph." His "deep transported mind" (to apply Milton's words to him) thus continues his moralization:—
What are the hopes of man? old Egypt's king Cheops, erected the first pyramid, And largest; thinking it was just the thing To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other rummaging, Burglariously broke his coffin's lid: Let not a monument give you, or me, hopes, Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.
The Quarterly Review, in reviewing Light's Travels, observes, that "Cheops employed three hundred and sixty thousand of his subjects for twenty years in raising this pyramid, or pile of stones, equal in weight to six millions of tons; and to render his precious dust more secure, the narrow chamber was made accessible only by small intricate passages, obstructed by stones of an enormous weight, and so carefully closed, externally, as not to be perceptible. Yet how vain are all the precautions of man! Not a bone was left of Cheops, either in the stone coffin, or in the vault, when Shaw entered the gloomy chamber." Sir Walter Scott himself, has justly received many eulogies. Perhaps none more heart-felt, than the effusion delivered at a late Celtic meeting, by that eloquent and honest lawyer, the present Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Exchequer, in Scotland, which was received by long, loud, and continued applause.