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 individual than of human grandeur in the abstract, and that set up even by the Church itself as a broad text upon 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 sourse 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 arrived 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. But 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.

VOL. XLIV. NO. CCLXXVI.

2 H

This may be bravery or cowardice; they may think thus to reconcile themselves by degrees to that which they scarcely dare face in all its reality. But to rehearse the funeral in full, even to the laying out the gloves and hat-bands, and to the examination of the accounts of the "forty per cents," would, if it became a fashion, doubtless ruin the trade. For, if men themselves were not satisfied with the rehearsal, their heirs would be. Milton rehearsed his, but that was to keep off the reality. There are many who profess to give up the world, to shut themselves up for the rest of their lives, who would do well to take this method of announcing to their friends their defunct state, that no further enquiries may be made about them, a practice which some debtors have found very convenient; for men desperately in debt, by so doing, may, like skilful divers, plunge over head and ears, in the sight of their creditors, and come up elsewhere. That a rich man, however, should see himself dead and buried, and then sit down to write his own epitaph, and send it per post to his executors, would be past belief, if it were not to be found among the freaks of humanity. There is an example, Eusebius, within my and your memory. You remember Sir Giles the sceptic-of- Park. It is generally supposed that he died abroad; but no such thing-by some means or other the truth has come out. Weary of property and prosperity, and of having no wants ungratified but the greatest, that of knowing what he wanted; morose, suspicious, misanthropic, he had long quarrelled with Providence for too amply providing for him; and more out of spite than conviction had long professed himself an atheist. At the age of seventy he meditated a new scheme of happiness; the only bar to the execution of which, for some time after the conception of it, being that it would confer happiness on others, a thing he never by any chance intended. He had for years shut himself up within his own domain, and had mostly taken his exercise by nightfall. In these nightly excursions he visited the owls, and the owls visited him, and they were mutually satisfied that they had no other society. It occurred to him that the monks of La Trappe must be an improvement on them, inasmuch as there must be less noise in

the convent. He formed, therefore, the scheme to become a member of their or some other monkish order. Whither he retired is not known. He left his beautiful domains, just at the moment his extensive lands and gardens were putting on their best summer looks, and gently breathing in every wind "enjoy."

This invitation was too much for him, for he was determined not to enjoy any thing. So he departed, ostensibly to pass a few months on the Continent. Thither he went, taking with him only one old faithful domestic. He proceeded to the town of B

Having been there a few weeks, he opened his scheme to this old and tried servant, and made him solemnly swear to keep the secret, and perform his part in the scheme-to give out that he was dead-and to procure a mock funeral. And to secure his fidelity, he showed him a very beneficial codicil in his will, not available but in case of his real or supposed death. I pass over the condition of the poor old domestic-he had served his master too long to dispute his will-and now there was a lurking wish that nobody else would dispute it. It had been law to him, and might be in the eyes of others. The plan is agreed upon. The old domestic becomes acquainted with some of the under attendants at the hospital of and by their means, under pretence that his master is a Professor of Anatomy, procures a body-conveys it to the lodgings-and, all minor matters prepared for the deception, tells the people of the house that a friend of his master's had died suddenly while paying him a morning visit. The body, under the real name of his mas ter is coffined, and magnificent orders given for the interment. Things being in this state, the domestic writes to the next heir an account of his master's sudden death; that he had been obliged to deposit the body in lead, and all was ready for the funeral, and waiting further orders," &c. &c.

The heir arrives, with little show of sorrow, and, strange to say, this rather amused than offended the old gentleman, Sir Giles, who now, under the disguise of a red wig and other ways and means of metamorphosis, at the recommendation of his servant to the Undertaker, has become one of the

official attendants upon his own funeral. Every thing was magnificently ordered, as becoming the rank of so considerable a man. In his capacity of assistant Undertaker, he was initiated into the mysteries, was even pleased with the sober riot and licentious decorum, the cheating, the pilfer, the knavery, and felt a new joy in his misanthropy. "Hung be the heavens with black." Though the Undertaker spread showers of silk, and suspended as clouds his sombre broad cloth, they were to him but as Xerxes' arrows, that shut out the day, but did not hit the sun of happiness that now, for the first time, shone in his heart. Happy to him was the day of his death, but far happier that of his burial. He looked upon his heir as the fool that had taken the burden of his station and property off his shoulders; and as he would have only hated him the more had he shown any feeling on the occasion, he was quite indifferent to the degree of sorrow he affected or omitted to affect. After the funeral he walked away, no one ever knew whither, bequeathing, as he fully believed, to his heir, all the miseries of prosperity unalloyed. Among his papers were found his epitaph:

66 παντα κόνις και

Tarta To under.” ~ The old domestic has recently died, and bequeathed his money to the Ebenezer Chapel at T—, and had disclosed, before his death, to relieve his conscience, so much as has enabled me to tell you the story. I have only a word or two to add to this long letter, that, in my spleen against all undertakers, that they may more effectually mourn in their professional calling, and get their "forty per cent" with entire impunity, I will remind them of the ancient discipline of their tribe among the Scythians, and sincerely wish they would return to it. Herodotus tells us, that when the king died, the undertakers who attended him (I will use the words of the historian), "cut off part of one ear, shave their heads, wound themselves on the arms, forehead and nose, and pierce the left hand with an arrow. Having done this, they accompany the chariot to another district, and this manner is observed in every province, till, having carried the dead body of the king through all his

dominions, they bury him in the country of the Garrhians." There is scarcely an undertaker's array, provided he be of any note, and has been long in the trade, that would not furnish the following list to be strangled-" a concubine to be strangled, with a cupbearer, a cook, a groom, a waiter, a messenger, certain horses." A Royal Funeral in those days was something worth seeing-for, not satisfied with the above, they took the King's Ministers, fifty in number, and strangled them; and with them the King's stud, fifty beautiful horses, and after they have emptied and cleansed their bellies (the King's Ministers, they having been supposed to have filled them extraordinarily), they fill them with straw, and sew them up again. Then they lay two planks of a semicircular form upon four pieces of timber, placed at a convenient distance, with the half circle upwards; and when they have erected a sufficient number of these machines, they set the horses upon them, spitted with a strong pole, quite through the body to the neck; and thus one semicircle supports the shoulders of the horse, the other his flank, and his legs are suspended in the air. After this they bridle the horses, and, hanging the reins at full length upon posts erected to that end, mount one of the fifty they bave strangled, upon each horse, and fix him in the seat by driving a straight stick upwards from the end of the back-bone to his head, and fastening the lowest part of that stick in an aperture of the beam that spits the horses. Then, placing these horsemen quite round the monument, they all depart; and this is the manner of the King's Funeral." The Scythians were a sensible people.

When Dr Prideaux offered to the publisher his connexion of the Old and New Testament, the bookseller remarked that it was a dry subject, and he could not safely print it, unless he could enliven it with a little humour. Perhaps, my dear Eusebius, you will charge me with making such an attempt upon a grave subject. Be that as it may, I know very well that if I do not make you laugh, you will laugh without me. Ever yours,

Z.

SCARFIELD is one of the old-fashioned villages that give such a charm to the rural scenery of England-not quite so romantic as Miss Mitford's Everlegh, nor so picturesque as Kenmore, nor so secluded as Callander, but a clean populous hamlet, buried in huge clumps of elms, with the smoke rising clear into the sky, and revealing the habitation of man long before the houses themselves are visible among the windings of the lane. A post town at a distance of three or four miles forms a link between it and the world; a sort of mooring-ring, attached to which the village rides securely amid the constantly rising waves of new events; and without which it would drift away into the vast ocean of oblivion. A river, too, like "Kennet swift for silver eels renowned," is another tie between it and the inhabitants of the rest of the world; for few weeks pass in the fishing season without sundry Viators and Piscators finding their way to the Crown, a small hostel, which stands aristocratically apart from the village, and promises, on a board at the gate, good entertainment for man and beast. When we add to these the weekly visits of various pedlars and teamen, miscellaneous beggars, and sometimes in the summer a pic-nic party from the neighbouring town, we feel almost inclined to alter our opinion of Scarfield, and to consider it entitled to more respect than we were at first disposed to allow it. Whatever de gree of importance we may attach to it, we are sure to receive the hearty concurrence of our valued friend Ignatius Hubble, F.R.S., who considers it unequalled in England, and has resided in the principal mansion, called Manor-hall, for twenty or thirty years. His wealth, his learning, his having written and published a book, and at last his venerable age, and a pig-tail of unusual length, have made him universally acknowledged as the "principal inhabitant." The farmers take off their hats-the squires shake his hand, and even the great Sir Wilfred Hammond, the owner of the estate, used not unfrequently to stay whole weeks with him, and make his house his home. What the cause of this

intimacy may have been it is difficult to conjecture, for two people more unlike than the scientific and literary Ignatius, and the fox-hunting, winebibbing baronet, can no where be found. It has been surmised, indeed, that mutual convenience may partly account for their friendship, for it was always remarked that a good many thick parchment parcels were visible during Sir Wilfred's visits, and that for a few days after he had gone up from Scarfield, he seemed to have amazing quantities of ready money. This circumstance could not fail to strike any body who compared it with his usual state of impecuniosity; for Sir Wilfred is one of those extraordinary individuals only to be met with in this land of attorney-stewards and broad-acres; who are owners of magnificent estates, and sometimes have only a faint recollection of the colour and shape of a guinea. It certainly is a great defect in the economy of nature that a man's income does not always expand in proportion to his family; and few people regretted this mal-arrangement more bitterly than Sir Wilfred. A stud at Newmarket, which he had kept without feeling the expense of it, fifteen years before, was a dreadful draw on him, now that he had a son at Cambridge; and even the pack of hounds he had started as a bachelor, made prodigious inroads on his fortune now that his wife had saddled him with Madame Carson's bills. It may seem strange that he did not give up Newmarket and his hounds; but the thought never entered his head. He thought a great deal oftener of his son giving up Cambridge, and his wife deserting Madame

but the son went on with his studies, my lady went on with her dress, Newmarket rejoiced in his racers, and Tom Herrick still hunted his pack. Mr Flashy continued to "do for him," as, in legal phraseology, he expressed it, and Sir Wilfred, about twice in the year, paid a flying visit for a few days to our worthy and ready-money friend, Ignatius Hubble.

Dear good old Ignatius! what a flood of good-humour inundated your countenance as day after day Sir Wilfred and you drew your chairs closer