living and the dead-that makes a soldier's funeral exce dingly 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 solemnity in funerals abroad, where the Church steps in at once, and takes possession of the deceased as under its protection, under the sanctity of its religious authority; and if it makes an exhibition, 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, barefooted, 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 consciousness 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 long train similar to that which preceded 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 midday, 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 to 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 season-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 apothe cary, 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 hatbands! 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 iliness 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 had 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. 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 hatbands, 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 inquiries 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