Note 39 — LECTURES ON THE DRAMATIC LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (continued 5)

The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor’s style was to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it.

‘Mortality, behold, and fear,

What a charge of flesh is here!

Think how many royal bones

Sleep within this heap of stones:

Here they lie, had realms and lands,

Who now want strength to stir their hands.

Where from their pulpits seal’d in dust,

They preach “In greatness is no trust.”

Here’s an acre sown indeed

With the richest, royal’st seed

That the earth did e’er suck in,

Since the first man died for sin.

Here the bones of birth have cried,

Though Gods they were, as men they died.

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropp’d from the ruin’d sides of kings.

Here’s a world of pomp and state

Buried in dust, once dead by fate.’