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Show t A Reriew of TanderbiiU V? j ; "The richest man in America fe xidw as poor as the poorest and claim bnt six feet of .earth.'! This : will, "-pass jas figure of speech, but as a matter of fact it is not true. When instinct .witfr life, and vanity, the now inanimate clajr made; a claim for his corpse "commerisurat(E',-'$ he viewed 3ty 'with - his wealth; dignijr and importance. - The son of the ' tavern-" keeper and shad-fisher of flew Brnn"8vitlt set a high price upon his 250 "ponndst pt clay, living or dead. It was not contemplated contem-plated in his scheme that his body should be resolved to earth like common mold. The blood of the market-gardeners was re-; garded by the millionaire as pactoliarf if not patrician,and,as he abode ill life, wftnlii the walls of a palace,, so in' deathy pre served from decay in defiance of one' of j the most salutary , of nature's Jaws, his burly bulk, should rest within martJle. j walls costing more than a million of dollars. dol-lars. Of his colossal fortune" Vanderbilt. gave something in the way of charity aiid public usefulness. : He despoiled . the Egyptians that one of its ancient, monuments monu-ments might crumble in Central Park.; He endowed some seats of learning.. He proffered to greatness in distress the assistance as-sistance of his inexhaustible purse Bat all the while he was rearing in the midst of the properties on Staten Island,' overlooking over-looking the bay in which his father's ferry boat plied, a mausoleum richer in architecture archi-tecture and material than the tombs of Roman emperors whose dust has been scattered these , many centuries to the winds. Sixty millions of people will not rear on the banks of the Hudson to a warrior they professed to esteem a monument mon-ument so costly as this single plutocrat devised as the receptacle of as common clay as ever cumbered the green earth. If the master was not ready for the tfbmb the tomb is ready for the master, and within a week will open its Npohderona and marble jaws to give him what in life he hoped would be eternal entrance. The judicious will marvel, the-ground-ling gape, at a structure, which advertises , with Btartling emphasis a vanity more vulgar than ever before was exhibited in a Republic which, until this generation, never nurtured the plutocrat nor submitted sub-mitted like dumb, driven cattle to his imprecation. ! The marble mausoleum on Staten Island will be at once the most magnifi- j cent and the most .melancholv monu-' ment of, human pride and folly ever erected in this land. It is a deification of i a Money Bag past the power of accumu- j lation, yet vaunting its ability to obtrude j its corpse upon the attention of the hu- j man family, which, on the whole, was i not the better but the worse for its life i and example, and cannot profit save in j the way of warning by the tomb its ra- ; pacitv has enabled its-esotism to con- : ( struct. i Like the rest of us,, when it shall please ' the fates to cut short our existence, Vanderbilt Van-derbilt dead should be given decently to the worms. The time for making up his earthly record closed with the stroke that stretched him dead fronting the parlor grate, which crackled on as merrily as if the ruins of two hundred millions did not lie prone in front. His clay is no better than the clay of Lazarus. The embalmer, , the mausoleum, the effort that would perpetuate a corpse despite the decree of nature, savor of blasphemy. It were better that a life of usefulness should have embalmed a memory while the body, like the actions of the just, should Smell sweet and blossom in the dust. Chicago Herald, 10th. - ; i |