courts look out for mansions in the duft. Let thofe gods on earth prepare to die like men; and fink down to a level with beggars, worms and clay. Let fubjects be wife, and confider their latter end, when the alarm of mortality is founded from the throne; and He who lived for their benefit, dies for their benefit too ;-dies to remind them, that they also muft die. But how astonisking and lamentable is the ftupidity of mankind! Can the natural or the moral world exhibit another phenomenon fo fhocking and unaccountable! Death fweeps off thousands of our fellowfubjects every year. Our neighbours, like leaves in autumn, drop into the grave, in a thick fucceffion; and our attendance upon funerals is almost as frequent and formal as our vifits of friendship or complaifance. Nay, fometimes death enters in at our windows, and ravages our families before our eyes. The air, the ocean, the earth, and all the elements, are armed with the powers of death; and have their peftilential vapours and inclemencies, their tempefts and inundations, their eruptions and volcanos, to destroy the life of man. A thousand dangers lie in ambush for us. Nay, the principles of mortality lurk in our own conftitutions and fickness, the herald of the last enemy, often warns us to prepare. Yet how few realize the thought, that they muft die! How few familiarize to their minds that all-important hour, pregnant with confequences of great, of incomparable, of infinite moment! How many forget they must die, till they feel it; and stand fearlefs, unapprehenfive and infolent, upon the flippery brink of eternity, till they unexpectedly fall, and are ingulphed for ever in the boundless ocean! The fons of Adam the finner, those fleeting phantoms of a day, put on the air of immortality upon earth; and make no provifion for their fubfiftence in the proper region of immortals beyond the grave. Pilgrims and ftrangers imagine themselves everlasting residents; and make this tranfitory life their all, as if earth was to be their eternal home; home; as if eternity was but a fairy-land; and heaven and hell but majestic chimeras. But fhall not this loud alarm, that spreads over half the globe, awaken us out of our vain dream of an earthly immortality? When the mighty is fallen, fhall not the feeble tremble? If the father of a people must cease to live, fhall not the people expect to die? If vulgar deaths are fo frequent or infignificant, that they have loft their monitory force, and are viewed with as much indifference as the fetting of the fun or the fading of a flower; fhall not the death of a King, the death of the King of Britain, conftrain his fubjects to realize the profpect of their own mortality, and diffuse that universal seriousness among them which that profpect infpires? If thus improved, this public lofs would be a public bleffing; and the reformation of a kingdom would be a greater happiness than the life of the beft of princes. Thus improved, how eafy and how glorious would the death of George the Second render the reign of George the Third, who now fways the fceptre, and in whom the hopes of kingdoms center! To govern fubjects on earth, who are prepared for the hierarchy of heaven, would be a province worthy of an angel. Since the mighty is fallen; fince George is no more; how vain are all things beneath the fun! Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. How unworthy the hopes, how inferior to the defires, how unequal to the duration of human nature! Can the riches of Britain, or the honours of a crown; can the extent of dominion, or the laurels of victory, now afford the leaft pleasure to the royal corpfe that lies fenfelefs in the duft; or to the royal spirit which has winged its flight to its own region, to the world of kindred spirits? No; all thefe are now as infignificant as mere nothings to him, as the conquefts of Alexander, or the riches and honours of the Henries and Edwards, who filled the fame throne centuries ago. "Who "Who then art thou, who fetteft thine affections on things below? Art thou greater than the deceased? Doft thou value thyfelf on thy birth? The moft highly defcended is no more! Doft thou value thyfelf on thy riches? The King of Britain is no more! Doft thou value thyfelf on thy power? The mafter of the feas, the arbiter of Europe, is no more! Doft thou glory in thy conftancy, humanity, affection to thy friend; juftice, veracity, popularity, univerfal love But I forbear.” Human vanity cannot fwell fo high as to prefume upon the comparifon. "How lately were the eyes of all Europe" and America, "thrown upon this great Man? For man let me call him now, nor contradict the declaration which his mortality has made. They that find him now, muft feek for him; and feek for him in the duft! What on earth but muft tell us this world is vain, if thrones declare it! If kings, if British kings are demonftrations of it! -O, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on Princes favours! "A throne is the fhining period, the golden termination of the worldly man's profpect. His paffions affect, his understanding conceives nothing beyond it, or the favours it can beftow. The fun, the expanfe of heaven, or what lies higher, have no luftre in his fight; no room in his pre-engaged imagination : it is all a fuperfluous wafte. When therefore his monarch dies, he is left in darkness his fun is fet: it is the night of ambition with him; which naturally damps him into reflection; and fills that reflection with awful thoughts. With reverence then be it spoken, what can God in his ordinary means do more to turn his affections into their right channel, and fend them forward to their proper end? Providence, by his king's deceafe, takes away the very ground on which his delufion rofe: it finks before him: his error is fupplanted, nor nor has his folly whereon to ftand, but muft return, like the dove in the deluge, to his own bofom again. By this he is convinced that his ultimate point of view is not only vain in its nature, but vain in fact: it not only may, but has actually failed him. What then is he under the neceffity of doing, this boundary of his fight being removed? Either he muft look forward (and what is beyond it but God?) or he muft clofe his eyes in darkness, and ftill repofe his truft in things which he has experienced to be vain. Such accidents, therefore, however fatal to his fecular, are the mercy of God to his eternal intereft; and fay, with the facred text, Set your affections on things above, and not on things on the earth.* If even kings cannot extract perfect happiness from things below; if the grofs, unsubstantial, and fleeting enjoyments of life are in their own nature incapable of affording pure, folid and lafting felicity, muft we not all despair of it? Yet fuch a happiness we defire; fuch we need; nay, fuch we must have; or our very existence will become our curfe, and all our powers of enjoyment but capacities of pain. And where fhall we feck for it? where, but in the fupreme Good? Let us lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, and be rich towards God; and then we fhall live in state-affluence, and confummate felicity, when crowns, and thrones, and kings, nay, when stars, and funs, and worlds are funk into promifcuous ruin. But though crowns, and thrones, and kings, though ftars, and funs, and worlds fink into promifcuous ruin, there is one gift of heaven to mankind which fhall furvive; which fhall flourish and reign for ever; ›a gift little esteemed or folicited, and which makes no brilliant figure in mortal eyes; I mean religion-Religion! Thou brightest ornament of human nature! Thou faireft image of the divine! Thou facred spark of celeftial fire, which now glimmers with but a feeble luftre; but will shine bright in the night of afflic Dr. Young's True Eftimate of Human Life, p. 59, 60. tion; will irradiate the thick glooms of death, and blaze out into immortality in its native element ! This will be an unfailing fource of happiness, through the revolutions of eternal ages.-May I be the man to whom heaven fhall beftow this moft precious gift of divine bounty! and let crowns and kingdoms be scattered with an undistinguishing hand to the worthlefs and the brave, to the wife man and the fool; I will not murmur, envy, nor defpond. These majestic trifles are not the tefts of real worth, nor the badges of heaven's favourites: it is religion that marks out the happy man; that diftinguishes the heir of an unfading crown; who, when the dubious conflict of life is over, fhall inherit all things, and fit in triumph for ever with the King of kings, and Lord of lords. If majesty has any charms to a mind truly noble; if dominion has any attractive influence upon a benevolent spirit; it must be as it affords a more extenfive sphere of beneficence, and yields the generous, difinterested, god-like pleasure of making multitudes happy. This may reconcile a mind intrinfically great to the felf-denial of a court, to the cares of government, and render the burden of a crown tolerable. And in this refpect, how happy and illuftrious was our late king! It was an honour which could fall to the lot of but few of his fubjects, to have fuch intimate access to the royal prefence, as to furnish materials for a panegyric upon his perfonal and private virtues; but his public and regal virtues diffused their beams to every territory of his vaft dominions, and fhone with efficacious, though gentle force, even upon us, in these remote ends of the earth. His public virtues as a king, thousands atteft and celebrate in every region of the world. Thefe we know, of these we have had a long and delightful experience for fourand-thirty years. These therefore we can juftly celebrate and to thefe I fhall confine myself; though I am not altogether uninformed of fome amiable anecdotes of his majesty's perfonal virtue in private life. Can |