"A POOR mean burial-ground-a dismal place raised a few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low parapet wall and an iron railing—a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot, where the very grass and weeds seemed in their frowzy growth to tell that they had sprung from paupers' bodies, and struck their roots in the graves of men sodden in steaming courts and drunken hungry dens. And here, in truth, they lay parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two-lay thick and close-corrupting in body as they had been in mind; a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek by jowl with life; no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed there every day, and piled high as their throats." Whether or no Mr Dickens had any particular churchyard in his thoughts when he penned the above, is a question which of course I cannot answer; but I passed by one, two or three days since, in that most hateful of streets, Drury- Lane, (there is another not quite so bad in Portugal Street,) which might well have sat for the portrait. Churchyard indeed it is not, for it has no church within or even near it; and, wanting that, consecrated ground though it be, it wants to my mind by far the greater part of its holiness. The resting-place of the dead in any case demands and deserves respect; but the reverence with which I enter a quiet country churchyard, where, around the holy pile beneath whose roof in life they congregated to worship,

"Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,"

is very, very different from the feeling, half akin to loathing, with which I enter one of these churchless metropolitan dead-pits.

One of these places is an admirable specimen of the art of packing, on a large scale-of compressing the greatest possible quantity into the smallest possible space. Your sexton is as a traveller preparing himself for a long journey, in whose well-filled portmanteau may be seen snowy ranks of neatly folded shirts, and white lines of stockings in orderly array, affording

Romeo and Juliet.

glimpses of a strong force of coats and inexpressibles unruffled by a crease. To make sure that he has left nothing behind, he once more opens drawer after drawer-and lo! he sees in one his whole army of waistcoats, wherewith he is to astonish the weak minds of his country cousins, overlooked and omitted! What could he have been thinking off? Well, with much care and delicate pressure, he contrives to find them a place, though his creaking portmanteau is compelled to "stretch its leathern coat almost to bursting" by the operation; it is as much as ever he can do to close the lid upon the contents, but he does manage it at last; and, thanking his stars that the job is over, turns himself round, and— horror upon horror!-turns only to encounter a formidable black band of boots and shoes, beginning much to marvel in what portion of the camp their quarters are to be allotted. There is no help for it. He has but that one "leathern convenience" in the world, and, somehow or other, in they must go. As the case stands, the thing is impossible. He must unpack and pack again, ab initio—and there is, moreover, no time to be lost. Out they come, shirts, stockings, neckcloths, waistcoats, cambrics" all his pretty ones," rumpled and crumpled, and creased and smutched-in they go again, still with some slight attempt at arrangement, and still those most stubborn and unflinching of all Wellingtons defy his efforts! Out come all the contents once again, and once again in they go, Wellingtons and all, but alas! now in "most admired disorder;" and the miserable wretch is finally discovered by his housemaid, who rushes up to announce that the coach is at the door, jumping and stamping upon the unyielding mass, with all the weight and desperation of thirteen stone and a half.

The illustration savours of the absurd, but it is not unapt nevertheless. Here is one of these grounds, in the very heart of London, crowded and crammed to within a few inches of the surface with the ghastly contributions of years; and day after day, and hour after hour, keep bringing in their never

ceasing supplies to the already overcharged storehouse-their gifts which may not be rejected-the fast-departing children of misery and toil, who found perhaps in their extremity a melancholy shadow of consolation, from the thought that their dead bones would at last find in the grave that peace and quietness which were denied on earth to the living spirit. But the "long home," the last long rest," of a London burial-ground! What a solemn mockery, when the same grave may change its owners as quickly and as often as lago's purse! Why, the very worm has scarcely crawled from his exhausted banquet, before the last tenant is "knaved out of his grave," to make room for a new occupaut, himself erelong to suffer the same indignity! Well indeed might old Sir Thomas Brown lift up his voice for a "burning burial," to escape from such "tragical abominations" as these!

I am not supposing that it will matter to me, when I am among the things that were, beneath what earth I lie, "or who," as Hamlet says, "plays at loggats" with my bones. I know well enough that no "knocking about the mazzard with a sexton's spade" will touch me then; but, despite the knowledge, there is something so revolting in the idea of being howked up like a dead flower-root to make room for a fresh one, that my bones, setting at nought my philosophy, "ache to think on't." And it is by no means the lightest part of the anticipation, that all this may come to pass at no very distant period-ay, so soon that many an eye, which wept over the coffin as the earth closed in upon its lid, may again be wet with a more indignant grief, when the coffinless bones lie scattered on the brink of the very grave erewhile dug for themselves, now yawning once more to receive a new possessor. It was but a few days since that I happened to see, in one of the morning newspapers, an advertisement by the authorities of some parish, whose name I forget, containing a list of monumental inscriptions, several of them

less than forty years old, and notifying that, unless the friends or relatives of the parties whom they commemorated took some measures with regard to them before a certain day, therein named, the stones would be removed, and, as a matter of course, the graves appropriated to the next claimant. This may be necessary, but it is disgusting, and therefore ought not to be necessary. Under this state of things, a son may return from a foreign land, after years of absence, and, on his first pious visit to the spot where he laid his parent, be horror-stricken at finding not a trace of the tomb which he reared to his honoured memory; or, worse still, detect some rascal sexton, who has "no feeling of his business," in the very act of tossing up his father's bones, to be moralized upon by a group of gaping charity boys, or snapped in twain by some unthinking idler, to see how strong they still are, and wonder how much longer they would yet hold out against their final destiny of " dust to dust."

We may become too familiar with the charnel-house and its contents; and too much familiarity, says the proverb, breeds contempt.+ A want of respect for the dead is apt to induce a want of reverence for death; and the grim King of Terrors himself, when men's feet are kicking about his trophies, stands in danger of becoming a mere subject for idle gossip, or coarse and ribald jesting. This is not as it should be: yet this, as it seems to me, the confined and crammed burial grounds, which one sees in many parts of London, must inevitably, in some degree, tend to produce.

I strolled the other morning, having nothing better to do, to the new General Cemetery at Kensal Green; I believe the first of the dozen or more, which, after its example, have started into existence in the suburban districts. These cemeteries stand in much the same relation to the London churchyards and burial-grounds, as the Canadas, or New Zealand, to the mother country. They are the points of emigration for the dead; and, as

such, they contribute in some degree towards correcting the evil of which I have been complaining. They do something but they cannot, nor indeed do I clearly see what can, do all. The very poor, who swarm and cluster together so densely in many quarters of the metropolis, can neither carry out their dead so far, nor pay the fees demanded for admission to these more undisturbed resting-places. They must still go on in the old way, and lie huddled together in death as closely as they have been wont to do in life. But to return to Kensall Green.

It is a wholesome thing to pay a visit to such a place as this. We are too apt to pass mere ordinary churchyards, poor portions and fragments of the spoils of Death, without being awakened to a due sense of his power, and experiencing only a sort of mournful secure pity, as though the few who slumber beneath its surface form the exception and not the rule. But here, where the eye cannot at one glance take in the whole extent of his territories, we recognise at once the full sweep of his tremendous arm: here we are compelled to acknowledge that beneath that arm we ourselves must bow and " : peep about" us, as it were involuntarily, for some unoccupied nook, in whose shade, when the hour has actually arrived, we may moulder to our primal dust.

It is a fine, large, open space, this cemetery, with its smooth shaven turf, its broad gravelled walks sloping gently upwards to the west, and, on the brow of the ascent, its small simple chapel, silent to all the services of our church save one-the most solemn and the most beautiful-most sorrowful and yet most cheering. As a whole, however, the place at present lacks solemnity. It wants more of those trees which universal and immemorial usage has appropriated to such melancholy localities-the fir, and the yew, and the "sad cypress ;" and those which it already possesses require yet a few years to bring them to maturity. The long lines of white tombstones, on either side of the boundary path, stand sadly in need of relief.

Among the multitude of monuments which have already been erected here,

there are, of course, designs of all sorts, good, bad, and indifferent--the latter forming a considerable majority. Turning into the right hand path as you enter the consecrated portion of the ground, there stands a neat obelisk to the memory of Scipio Cliat, inseribed simply with a cross, the name, and a date. I think it is Byron who somewhere, in one of his letters or journals, says that a name and a date are all that are required above one's grave.* Whoever it was, I fully agree with him. A bad or a mediocre epitaph is sufficient to mar the effect of the noblest tomb. One seldom meets with a decent inscription, even in prose; and as for the attempts of the kind in metre, they are enough to drive all Parnassus crazy. Our very jest-books are full of ridiculous effusions of this nature. A traveller, condemned, by some "accident of flood or field," to tarry for an afternoon in a remote country village, strolls into the churchyard to read the epitaphs, with the same confident anticipation of amusement that he would feel in opening an album of H. B.'s caricatures, or the third series of Sam Slick, did the humble parlour table of the hostelry present such an unlooked for resource. But there is a large class of well-meaning people, who seem to think a gravestone without an epitaph a mere wilful waste of so much good stone; and that with one, or rather by one, the claims of the departed to the consideration of the public are mightily strengthenedthat a plain tombstone is considerably more respectable than a simple raised turf-but that a tombstone, with an epitaph to boot, is positively and indisputably genteel. Therefore it is that, as observes the cosmopolite Lieu Chi Altangi, "when the person is buried, the next care is to make his epitaph." Somewhere or other one must be discovered, and the surviving poets of the family set to work with all their might to supply the desider. atum, much to their own satisfaction, and still more to the public amusement. The very stonemason's journey man, as he chisels the doggerel, must laugh at its absurdity. There are two or three fine specimens of the

How people manage to bathe me mories, I do not well understand; and as for the third line, it reminds me so irresistibly of Mrs Kenwigs, and her "too beautiful, much too beautiful" offspring, that if I am, by such reminiscence, blinded to any real beauty in the composition, the shoulders of Boz must be content to bear at

least a moiety of the blame. This is just the sort of composition which is bad enough to provoke criticism, without being, at the same time, sufficiently unassuming to disarm it. pithy couplet

"Here lie I and my two daughters.

The

The devil take the Cheltenham waters!"

many of the tombs here are too pretty Perhaps I am over-fastidious-but to please my taste. I like to see a grave kept with neatness and simplicity; the turf cannot be too green, the weeds cannot be too carefully removed; but, were I constituted censor of such matters, I am inclined to think I should publish an edict against

"Here I lays,

Kill'd by a chaise,"

graves here which are positive gardenplots, with the mould carefully raked and watered, and little painted wooden or iron trellis-work running round the

Here is another of them

"Affectionate baby once was I,

Pride of my parents' hearts,
Who sooth'd my sorrows when I cried,
And press'd me to their breast."

Now, in this there is certainly no rhyme, and for it there is as certainly no reason. Somewhere hereabouts too, four lines, from one of the noblest passages that ever flowed from the pen

of Walter Scott, have been pressed into the service, without, as far as I can discover, any very material improvement.

"Genius, and taste, and talent gone, For ever tomb'd beneath the stone, Where, taming thought to parents' pride, Our lovely babes sleep side by side"the younger of the said "babes" having died at the age of eleven, and the elder at sixteen!

But a truce for a few moments with the bards of the gravestone, while I stop to read who owns this massive mausoleum, which towers unapproached in hugeness above the surrounding tombs of ordinary mortals. "The Family Grave of James Morison the Hygeist." What! and were pills in vain? "Throw physic to the dogs! I'll none of it!" Well, peace be with

hearts-ease, and fifty other small flowers, which have in them no touch the surviving relatives really did come of sadness. One would fancy that there, as somebody has in a most Jutanize upon their mother's grave." venal-like line expressed it, to “boThis is adopting the affectation, as well as the utility, of the foreign cemeterial system. Were it not for the cultural mourners might as well have sake of the burial-service, these floriburied their dead in their own summer-bowers, or in the borders beneath their own parlour windows. But these are not the only specimens of amateur grave-making, if I may so call it, to be found here. There is one thingfor monument it is not-composed of literally nothing but wire trellis-work, and in shape and structure for all the world like a huge and extremely elaborate bird-cage; or still more, perhaps, like one of those magnificent barley-sugar pavilions, which stand in pastrycooks' shop windows to make the eyes and mouths of little boys and girls of all descriptions stare, and gape, and water, for wonderment. The good, honest, solid gravestones round about ought to rise en masse, and vent