When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of ~e buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were horn and that they died.