mis-spellings. One can fancy that on moonlight nights, when the shadows connect grave with grave, and stone with stone by their distinct lines, that gentle spirits come out of them, and, linked together in groups, seek amusement, their permitted hour in reading each other's histories, and humble praise You know, Eusebius, I do not mock-there is no thought that is not in some sense a reality; and such a one, if it passes through the mind but a moment, awakens but a natural instinct, assuring us that even death is not all death. Somewhere the dead are, and I do not think we are the worse for bringing them nearest to ourselves. The country churchyard has besides another charm It rarely witnesses the undertaker's pomp. They are mostly town ferrets-here, poor men are chiefly brought to their graves on poor men's shoulders; there is in general more decency than show, though the village carpenter will sometimes affect the undertaker; but it is in a humble way, and the consequences are not disastrous. There is a custom with country clubs that is not a bad one every member, in case of the death of wife or husband of any member, gives a shilling to the survivor. This does more than pay the funeral expenses, and as there is not as yet any very great ambition for display, it may be hoped that substantial comfort is offered by the custom-yes! substantial comfort, for it is a comfort that there may be a loaf, and somewhat more in the house, even after friends have broken bread, and temparately taken a parting draught, not taken without a solemnity, and moral, and perhaps religious feeling. Bereavement is made worse by immediate deprivation of life's comforts. A little time is required for reconcilement to worse things, and this club aid is in general very timely, and it does not go to the undertaker. The sleeping family of a country churchyard, as I remarked, are generally undisturbed by grandeur, seeking to mingle its bones with the humble-it does happen sometimes. I remember well a procession which came from a considerable distance, which though the parties concerned in it were not themselves grand, being too much left to the taste and ambition too of the undertaker, was somewhat conspicuous. I bore a part in it as mourner -we were two days upon the road,

and such two days! never shall I forget them. When we had left the town, it seemed as if all had thrown off even the semblance of sorrow. I was in the coach with the nearest relatives, who very sensibly endeavoured to make the journey as little dismal as might be, and succeeded; so that it was even pleasant. There was nothing to blame here; but the officials of the procession, the cavalcade, the undertaker, and his "merry-men all,” made holiday all the way. It was observable enough, that as fiddlers on entering a village strike up a note or two to show their calling, so on such occasions did our friend the " forty per cent" marshal his men, and for a few moments affect professional solemnity; but it did not always succeed, the officials did not go quite the straight way they were marshalled; and at the inns at night, I very much suspect the corpse was left to take care of itself; for "twas merry in the hall." And upon one occasion I remember the procession was stopped before we entered a town-the mutes were missing, and when found, they had been strangely and ludicrously metamorphosed. The mutes had been with the liquids, and there was confusion in their tongues. We arrived at length by the help of pretty fast driving; when not too near town and village, without being weary of our journey, we deposited the deceased in a country church vault. And I recollect thinking as I stood near the ceremony, and marked the stupid unconcern of the crowds that came to see the show, that it was a needless waste of money to bring thither with so much pomp one whom not one of the village population had known, or would ever acknowledge by any sympathy, to be flesh of their flesh, or bone of their bone, no, nor even dust of their dust. And all this coldness and indecency, if I may so call it, was purchased at the cost of some hundreds of pounds, for the benefit of the Undertaker.

It is very evident that costly funerals have not, for their first object, respect for the dead. The pride of the living is more conspicuous in them. If however they were a solemn lesson to all men, if they were a public proclamation of death-a warning that all should take heed to their ways, it would be well. The burial-service is so; but it is precisely where the undertaker's work of parade commences

that there is an interruption of the solemnity, which is not taken up again until the last deposit in the earth, when the friend and the relative steal forward, and drop their tears into the grave, and the men of business keep in the back-ground-often even then indecorously to pack up their trappings for another show. And there is always sure to be something ridiculous mixed up with their proceedings. In the last case it was strikingly so to even the would be mourners; for they were not thought of, and the appearance of wo was discarded a mile out of town, the pace quickened, and the resumption of the farce occasionally, made the whole a mockery. The dress assumed; the mutes; hired mourners; the known circumstance that they have never perhaps seen the deceased, nor care one farthing for him or her, and often they know not which; their sleek appearance, bodily; their enormous eating and drinking; their impatience to shuffle up their paraphernalia ; all those things, which are besides most adverse to any sympathy with the real mourners, have in themselves much of the ridiculous. The mummery before our eyes leaves us no time to think of the defunct; and if we do, it is to picture him, not as death, but as the mummers have tricked him up. The mind's eye can with difficulty penetrate the plumed enclosure. The very idea of the Trade of Wo, that all is hired for the occasion, is revolting to better feeling. Now it is the absence of this hired sorrow, and the room that is left to the imagination of the sepctator, by the dress and sword of the soldier upon his coffin, to personify the dead-to see him, at a glance, the living and the dead that makes a soldier's funeral exceedingly affecting. And here all that attend have been his companions, nor is there any pantomime trickery of dress and gesture. These are the very arms he wore, he handled-the boots, their hability, their fitness to the individual, all that which made them his, and him theirs, is not yet departed. We see the man more awfully than if we actually saw him lying in his coffin. The value of the individual man is stamped by the official military attendance, and serves as an epitaph of merit. The costliest funeral of the highest son of earth has nothing so affecting.

There is much more solemnity in

funerals abroad, where the Church steps in at once, and takes possession of the deceased as under its protection, under the scanctity of its religious authority; and if it makes an exhihibition, it is with authority,-and this proclamation has holiness in it. All that is not ecclesiastical is kept out of sight. There is nothing intermediate between the deceased and the Church. The undertaker interferes not, intrudes not here to spoil all. Death it is true reigns for the hour, but religion triumphs. The Church certifies the triumph, and the resurrection. I well remember, my dear Eusebius, how much I was once affected by an exhibition of this kind, on the very first night of my entering Rome. It was dark; a singularly impressive cry attracted my attention. I was led by the sound some distance, I knew not where, for I was totally unacquainted with the city. I found myself in a large and long street, at the further end of which I could see many torches, and heard a constant repetition of the cry. I waited, leaning against a large pillar, until the procession should reach me. It did so, and passed in great order; first came the several religious orders, all bearing torches, as I should suppose, in number many hundreds. Then a single figure, a miserable friar, of some low order apparently, bare-footed, with his cord round his waist, bearing on his back a common coffinshell, totally unornamented; in fact, a few poor boards tacked together; immediately after him, a sumptuous and highly raised car or bier, on the front and lower part of which was a splendid display of armorial bearings, and above the body. It was a lady-of a fine person, and noble and handsome aspect. She lay extended; her hands joined as in prayer; her face, her hands, and her feet naked and uncovered; the rest of her person appeared in a stole of black, and such as showed the beauty of her form. She appeared to be about thirty years of age. Her countenance I shall never forget; it was extremely placid, pale, had no sunken and worn character, as if disease had touched it. You could scarcely believe there was not conciousness remaining; or whether remaining, as of the world left, or imparted as of the new world, were the doubt. It passed; and then followed a lon train similar to that which prec

ceded the body, of monks and friars, and all religious orders numberless, with torches, and singing as they passed "the Miserere," as did the whole procession. I did not follow to the church, for I was afraid of losing my way; and I had heard strange tales of the streets of Rome, which deterred me. In this case the parade lost its vanity and pride, for it seemed less of the indivdual than of human grandeur in the abstract, and that set up even by the Church itself as a broad text unpon death, and humility, and all things, rather to be offered than displayed at the foot of the cross in the sanctuary to which the procession was moving. How contemptible did all the funerals I had ever seen, in which display was affected, seem after this? There is much in the idea that no unhallowed hands touch the body-be it so, or not, you are persuaded it is the case. There is no vulgar intervention between life, death, and the tomb. Every act, after the breath has departed, is of sanctity and religious rite.

I was on another occasion much struck with this. Turning the corner of a street in Rome, also, and at mid-day, I suddenly came upon a tall personage dressed in ecclesiastical habit, carrying before him a coffin, in which was a child, a girl, probably about ten years of age. She was very beautiful. To say the face was pale would ill describe the appearance; it was marble pallor, with a look as if it had been recently so converted from living flesh and blood. Yet the idea of weight conveyed by the word marble must be excluded from that celestialized look and substance. Indeed, seeing that it was the body of one of the age I have mentioned, it has since been a source of some wonder that the priest could so easily carry it, and that surprise still more spiritualizes the subject. But that it was so pale, it might have been, to the imagination, an angel caught sleeping, and brought in the flowers of Paradise in which it had decked itself-for there were flowers in festoons from head to foot. None followed-there was but the priest with this beautiful child. It has been, thought I, discovered in its death to be an angel, and has put off in this sleep all its earthly ties and thoughts. Nor parents, nor relatives, must follow it. It must be laid by priest's hands in the temple for a sea

son-then will sister angels come to awaken her, to own her, and to bear her away. It was but a few moments while the ecclesiastic was passing, that I gazed upon the figure, yet often has the vision recurred to my mind; how quick is thought, how searching is observation, when a mystery, nature knows not what, makes the impression! I said, Eusebius, that undertakers keep clerical company for mutual advantage-let the relatives look to that

but when they are in league with the medical profession, let the sick man look to what stuff he takes. Many years ago my good father, whom you know, Eusebius, to have had a natural antipathy to any thing sordid, was sent for to receive his farewell and blessing from an aged aunt upon her sick-bed at Bath. He ar rived in time to see her alive, and likewise to have an interview with the apothecary, who on taking leave at the door-the old lady yet living-said softly and significantly to my father, putting a half a guinea at the same time into his hand, for he took him for the butler, my father being particular in his dress" Be so good, sir, as to inform the family that my brother is an undertaker." Fagots and fury! gloves and hat-bands! but such a thing as this ought to be looked into. If such should be the practice now at Bath or elsewhere, we are none of us safe in our beds. I have observed that an undertaker pays his court to the penurious wealthy. Misers are frequently known to be profuse in this their last, their only expenditure. They not uncommonly give very large directions for their funerals; and, with a whimsical inconsistency, have driven hard bargains upon the occasion, which they are shrewd enough to know will not be adhered to, and in some instances, have given an order on their heirs for the amount, and taken discount beforehand for their own funerals. It is but one of the freaks of pride. I knew a man who denied his aged wife, with whom he had lived forty years, in her last illness, medical attendance or nurse, and the many little comforts she wanted. But once dead, his affection was shown by extraordinary magnificence in her funeral. Great was the display. The coffin was the most sumptuous that could be; all went on to the universal astonishment of the neighbourhood at great cost. Bnt alas, the fit was over

the day before the funeral should take place. A thought struck him that he could save something in conveyance of the coffin from the undertaker's, and in the dusk of the evening he sent for it home in a dung-cart. It upset by the way, perhaps through the malice and the contrivance of the undertaker, and arrived in broad day at the miser's door, daubed with mud, and a troop of hooting boys after it. He forgot to give directions respecting his own burial; perhaps the costly experiment and failure of his wife's interment sickened him; his son certainly did not trouble his head about the magnificence of it.

The celebrated Van Butchel was worthy of our respect, not so much for his beard and spotted horse, as for his determination and success in defrauding the black fraternity of their unreasonable expectations. He was at no sumptuous cost for his wife. It has been said that an annuity had been bequeathed to her, "as long as she should be above ground." Be that,

however, as it may. He did preserve her above ground, and above ground she may be now perhaps. For he was the inventor of a new pickle, and in the experiment the great John Hunter was coadjutor. It is quite pleasant to think that one human being in the great city could escape the hands of the Black Harpies. The old woman in Horace was to be carried oiled, to see if it was possible for her to slip through the hands of her heir and the undertakers. But the pickle of Madame Van Butchel was a happier thing, for through it she was never carried out at all, but preserved at home.*

If a man would but consider every funeral he sees as his own, or as specimens of the trade, from which to select for himself, how much absurdity, mockery, and expense would he determine to cut off. Some have taken a fancy to have their coffins made, while in good health themselves, and kept them constantly before their eyes.