Charles Lamb

IN THE CHURCHYARD
I continued in the churchyard, reading the various inscriptions, and moralizing on them with that kind of levity which will not unfrequently spring up in the mind, in the midst of deep melancholy. I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, and dutiful children. I said jestingly, Where be all the bad people buried? Bad parents, bad husbands, bad children, what cemeteries are appointed for these? do they not sleep in consecrated ground? or is it but a pious fiction, a generous oversight, in the survivors, which thus tricks out men's epitaphs when dead, who, in their lifetime, discharged the offices of life, perhaps, but lamely? Their failings, with their reproaches, now sleep with them in the grave. Man wars not with the dead. It is a trait of human nature, for which I love it.
. . .

ON RISING WITH THE LARK
At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night-gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalist enough to determine. But, for a mere human gentleman - that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises - we take ten or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice) to be the earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say, for to do it in earnest requires another half-hour's good consideration.
Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gauds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But, having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances, which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as it is called) to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring here sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller.