The Eulogy

I wrote of a eulogy of Septimus Harding in A Braided Cord and having read it again, was thinking about famous eulogies in general, of which there are many, including that of my brother,given at my mother's funeral which I also have referred to, or more properly, to which I  have also referred, not therefore ending with a conjunction, since she was a school teacher. Elegiac writing generally can be very evocative for those of us perched on a thinner branch and the eulogies of Charles Dickens in his descriptions of the death of Little Nell never failed to bring tears and a gasp to my head. Dickens famously toured the United States extensively, reading from his novels, and famously he was also always brought to tears when he read his paragraph on the death of Little Nell. The other Dickensian eulogy that is a throat catcher for me is the reflection of Sydney Carton on those he loved as he rolled on the tumbril to the lady guillotine. It comes here, from someone whose life was always self serving, in the moment of impending death, when the novelist allows him to redeem himself.
Dickens and Trollope often painted a serious picture of the spirit of mankind, revealed at the last.