Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

The speaker uses funerary or commemorative “monuments” as a prompt for a familiar moral reflection: human beings build lasting markers to honor the dead, yet time erases even the identities those markers were meant to preserve. The sentence turns on an irony—people expend effort to record “respect” for individuals, but “posterity” often cannot even attach a name to the honored person. The quote thus participates in a long tradition of memento mori and “vanity of human wishes” themes, questioning whether public memorialization truly defeats oblivion or merely advertises the living’s desire to appear dutiful and reverent.