8 THE DANCE OF DEATH. slight indeed. This rending asunder of the twin components of humanity, like everything else which comes within the ken of that humanity, is personified. Death, like the Devil, is considered one real person. It has always been so. But while the ancients shewed Death as brother to Sleepa veiled figure, dim, unknown, mysteriouswe, of the Gothic type, rush rudely into the charnel-house, and dragging forth the earthy scaffold of our earthly frame, endow it with a Satanically malicious spirit all of our own conception, and cry Behold ! This is Death ! What power, too, has not the phantom's malignancy had given him by painters and poets: says Drexelius, " Tho' Death with drowsie Eyes does wink at Health, And lets you live a little while by stealth ; Yet he'll awake, and vext at past delay, Snatch you with sad surprising haste away." The same writer indeed says that Death is sudden, but beautiful ; yet only, it seems, when he snatches us at our work. Everywhere we find Death considered a monster, that, like Assanus Sassa the Turk, takes our old clothes from us, however much we prefer them, compelling us to take in exchange new garments we would rather be without. Doubtless this embodiment of Death in a repulsive, vengeful, hateful, personal form, was originally adopted to admonish those of wicked life, who could not look forward to the embraces of mother earth without feeling that for them dry bones had none but a terrible meaning. The universal recognition of the ghastly figuritivism, however, seems also to have some ground in the