at ten shillings, twenty shillings, forty shillings, three pounds, four pounds, &c.; in the chancel, at twenty shillings, forty shillings, three pounds, four pounds, five pounds, yea, ten pounds: and yet the purchaser hath no assurance of it, but is constrained to hold it ad voluntatem domini, or as a tenant for seven or ten years, within which term he is oftentimes cast out, and another put into his room, and no writ of quare ejecit infra terminum lieth for him. Shall I tell what I was ashamed to hear? A grave or burying-place let to farm at twenty shillings a year, the rent being duly paid for divers years; and being then behind, the parson threatened to uncase the corpse by pulling down the monument if it were not satisfied: and shame was so far from him as he spared not to defend it even before the commissioners. Strange things to me,-what to others I know not.'

"De

If Sir Henry Spelman thought and wrote thus indignantly of the ordinary fees claimed by the church for covering up our ashes, what would he have said to a joint-stock company subscribing its twenty-five pounds a-piece as a profitable investment of capital? He would have scorned those who could seek such revolting gains; but he would have spurned at them when he saw that they pretended to cloak their sordid object with pretences of public good. clare yourselves," he would have said, an associated body of undertakers, sextons, grave-diggers, bell-ringers, coffin-makers, shroud-makers, and offer to serve the public upon such terms as may tempt them to employ you: but do not seek to make your money by the gross cheat of fine feelings and patriotic desires. Let your fellow-creatures rot as they have rotted, if you have nothing better to offer, for providing them with rotting places, than the rottenness of your own selfish ends. What care you for public health, or public decency, supposing (which is not proved) that the one is endangered and the other violated, so as you can get hold of the public money? Then doff your mask; and be content, like other traders, to attract customers for your commodities by showing that they are cheaper and better, or as cheap and as good, as those offered by your neighbours."

But the sages of the "General Ceme

tery Company" have discovered that it is a "dangerous practice" to bury in churches and churchyards. Where is their evidence? We defy them to produce any, except their own ignorant and interested assertions. London is crowded with burial-places; but London is one of the healthiest capitals in Europe. Is there one medical man, one scientific man, in the country, who will venture to affix his name to an opinion declaratory of the fact that diseases are engendered by decaying bodies underground, or deposited in vaults? Who that has walked through a churchyard thick with graves, ever perceived any thing in the air indicative of mephitic exhalations? Who that knows any thing of the quick process of decomposition, or has seen a grave opened where mouldering bones alone remain after a few years, would expect they should spread disease? And where is the proof that disease EVER HAS been communicated to the living by the buried dead?

Then as to the moral influence of churchyards being contiguous to churches. Surely, the living, when they approach the temple of the Deity to be reminded of those duties which in their performance take the sting out of the arrow of death, and rob the grave of its victory, are not the less prepared for receiving such admonitions by beholding around them the memorials of those who have already gone to their dread account? The solemnity of the churchyard is no unbefitting preparation for the solemnity of the church. It speaks to every heart; forces itself upon every mind; tells us emphatically what we are and what we must become; it is a teacher whose voice we may disregard indeed, but which we cannot refuse to hear. The practice of every age, of those ages when piety, and religion, and virtue, were something more than mere names,

by surrounding the house of prayer with the sad receptacles of mortality, proves more eloquently than a thousand pens could do, the connexion in the spirit of man between this world and the next. Our ancestors had none of that spurious sensibility which is made the pretext now for veiling from our eyes the evidences of our common lot, and converting into a country jaunt the visit to ornamental sepulchres on the sunny side of a rural hill.

Let it not be imagined from what we have said, that we are opposed to any judicious, simple, and English plan for providing adequate burial-places for our increased and increasing population. But the plain fact is, such places are sure to be provided, till the time arrives when there shall be a general taste for leaving our dead unburied; and we stand in just as much need of a general dining company, or a general sleeping company, to induce people to eat and drink, or go to bed, as a general cemetery company to encourage burying. Divested of its character as a contrivance to make money, it becomes ridiculous.

Nor is this tom-foolery less ridiculous when viewed as a piece of cockney sentimentality, for pensive publicans, tender tailors, sympathetic sempstresses, maudlin men-milliners, rural relations, and pastoral plebeians, to weep and wander amid flower-decked graves and gaudy tomb-stones. "The grounds," says the prospectus, "will be laid out and planted after the celebrated cemetery of Père-laChaise, surrounded with an ornamental inclosure, &c." and in order that the children of sensibility who have never sighed in the pathetic shades of Père-laChaise at Paris, may know how that place is" laid out and planted," a "document" is circulated with the prospectus of the General Cemetery Company, from which we extract the following touching

passages:

Here may be seen every possible device in the least applicable to so solemn a subject. On one side behold pure and unaffected simplicity courting you to read the last memorial to departed worth; whilst at no great distance, grandeur exhibited even in the tomb commands an inquiry-to whom it can belong? The tablet will, probably, unravel the mystery, and declare the author of so magnificent a work more prominent, perhaps, than the name of him whose virtues, or whose fame, it is intended to record. So,

on either side of the finely coloured gravel walk, neatness and gaudiness alternately attract the attention of the visiter. There stand the stately marble pillars, here the superb and chaste temple; the portal is open, and the stranger is tempted onwards by some beauteous flowers preserved under glasses, recured by a light iron railing, from a ruthless hand-the guardian, also, of the precious remains contained within its precincts. Tombs of marble of every hue, and tombs of stone, carved according to the skill

of the most able workmen, with sepulchral urns and vases of every shape and every fashion, are not amongst the least remarkable of the ornaments of this place.

In the midst of all this solemn splendour, are the humble and unobtruding monuments of the less wealthy. What fortune denies, nature furnishes in abundance: stately trees, with finely shadowing foliage, interspersed here and there, cover the walks from the piercing beams of the glorious sun, and serve as a canopy to the superior monuments; but the smiling flowers of the parterre, respondent to the unceasing care bestowed upon them, grow in rich luxuriance around the more humble tombs, gladdening the sight-the poor man's consolation. Some, however, an emblem both of the shortness and the casualties of life, well befitting the occasion, lie heaped together, cut from the parent plant, there to wither and to fade; yet, again, the watchful attention of friends has conveyed thither the works of the most skiful florist to make a perpetual Spring, and to render imperceptible the decay in nature; and artificial flowers in proud triumph are ingeniously placed among the tombs, interwoven with the natural foliage, so as to be taken by a casual observer as actually the

gift of the goddess Flora herself!!!

The irregularities of nature are a surprising feature in the tout ensemble of this pious design, and add peculiar beauty to the scene: laid out upon a hill of uneven surface, sundry minor elevations, as well as lower grounds, have afforded the artist the greatest possible field for embellishment, and given scope for the most admirable arrangement !!

Perhaps, in some

secluded spot a devout husand, a pious wife, or children urged by filial love and affection, may be adding to the interest of the whole, whilst perceived, yet scarcely seen, in fervent prayer, they are, according to the principles of their faith, making intercession for some dear friend, who has already entered into "the valley of the shadow of death," and with solemn looks, "each speaking in his heart, only his lips moving, but his voice heard not," they breathe forth an ardent expectation that their supplications are not in vain. Through the thick foliage of the trees, and the high-raised Cenotaphs, may now and then be seen a figure pressing forward in some well-known path, with perturbed looks and downcast eyes, wishing to elude observation. Who can view this daughter of affliction and weep not, or feel at least some rising sympathy?

Is not this a beautiful picture? Is it not just worthy of a people, whom Voltaire described-(and let the events of the first revolution declare how truly)

as a compound of the "monkey and the tiger?" Is it not precisely what we might expect from a people who, during that revolution, committed in cold blood, the most disgusting, the most execrable, the most hideous and revolting outrages upon the grave, upon the dead, upon every affection, feeling, and principle which dignify or endear the ties of social and domestic life?

But what have Englishmen, what have Englishwomen, to do with such mummeries? Our matrons, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, mourn for those of whom they are bereaved, not after this fantastical fashion. They want no finely-coloured gravel walks, no flowers preserved under glasses, no artificial ones, no decorated graves, to bespeak their sorrow. They are not mourners in public, to show a well-turned elbow, while they hold the cambric handkerchief to eyes, "unsullied with a tear." Their grief is the grief of nature; and nature in her tribulation seeks solitude and the deep retirement of silent thought. We do not dress our face in wo at stated intervals, and bend over the sepulchre of those we loved, in a studied attitude of theatrical despair. It is alien to our nation; foreign to our character. We are as far removed from all this coxcombry, this dandyism of feigned affliction, as we are from the shrugs, and grimaces, the kissings and

huggings, of the half-monkeys, half-tigers, by whom they are practised. An honest John Bull would only laugh at the knavish fool whom he saw blubbering and groaning over a grave stuck with daffadowndillies, in the English Pèrela-Chaise, between pastoral Paddington and the rural road to Harrow.

We will not now descend into the particulars of the scheme of the "GeneralCemetery Company." When we see reason to believe that there are fifty persons of ordinary common sense seriously engaged in promoting it, then they shall hear from us again. Meanwhile, we shall content ourselves with finally observing, that in whatever light it is viewed, it is equally open to ridicule and reproach. To reproach, as an odious speculation for making money under false and hollow pretences of public good, though the public are really no more interested in the design than they would be in a project for removing the catacombs of Egypt to the top of Primrose Hill: and to ridicule, as a piece of un-English foppery, well suited to the capacity of the projector, but incapable of being engrafted upon the plain, manly, and sober qualities of the English character, in all things abhorrent of frippery, and in nothing more so than in what concerns the best affections of the human heart.

G.