Crossword-Solution: EPICEDIUM 9 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 16

But now a quill from thine own wing I pluck, thy lofty fate to sing; Whilst we behold the varions fight With mingled pleasure and affright; The humbler hinds do fall to pray'r, As when an army's seen i' th' air, And the prophetick spannels run, And howle thy epicedium.

Imagination pictures to him his funeral pomp--the grave they are digging for him--the lamentations that will accompany him to his last abode-the epicedium that surviving friendship may dictate; he persuades himself that these melancholy objects will affect him as painfully even after his decease, as they do in his present condition, in which he is in full possession of his senses.

Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be converted into a blank.

Nor were men wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.

Countenances of such amazement were turned towards him, that Small, who had a keen sense of the ludicrous, could scarcely forbear smiling as he proceeded; and if we could suspect so grave a personage of waggery, we should almost think that, by way of retaliation, he had palmed some abstruse, monkish epicedium upon his astounded auditors.