Accordingly to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and their servants, (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands,) take what was left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighboring brook, running hard by.

_Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over._"[1]--Church History.
[Footnote 1: The concluding period of this most lively narrative I will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met with.

One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that stops a beer-barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,--a diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or influence.
I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old Fuller.

But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different from that in which the writer composed it?
The most pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness.

When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out, "O that I were a mockery king of snow, To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke," if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit: and so is a "head" turned into "waters."] * * * * * ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR.