generations have to rely upon the revelations of our churchyards for
facts connected with the people of modern times, they will write that
we were all of us faultless as fathers, irreproachable as husbands,
and devoted and self-sacrificial as children. Every tombstone is
engraved with a catalogue of human virtues; and idlers wandering round
about our country churches, find themselves surrounded by the ashes of
fond husbands, innocent angels, and adored wives. These prattlings of
sorrow have their happy significance, since they show the universal
forgiveness that follows even the worst and basest of mankind to the
grave. But viewed as historical records, tombstones are sadly erring
guides. They tell histories of men, written by their mistresses or
their children. The sculpture which adorns the graves of modern races
in this country, generally represents urns, or weeping cherubims,
broken flowers, or fractured columns, or grieving angels. These
symbols of death and grief contrast often oddly with the hopeful
scriptural sentences which they surmount. In some instances the
occupation or calling of the deceased is typified on his tomb--the
unstrung lyre telling the whereabouts of a dead musician; and a
palette indicating the resting-place of a defunct painter. Little that
is great in sculpture has of late marked burial-places.

The Egyptians, on the contrary, employed their choicest workmen to
decorate their tombs. The visitor may, gathering together the
scattered fragments from this saloon, picture to himself one of the
massive solemn vaults of the old Egyptians--the walls decorated with
sepulchral tablets, and beneath each tablet a massive sarcophagus,
containing the mummy of the deceased whose actions the tablet records.
Not altogether unlike the vaults of the present day, save that
perishable materials suffice for modern notions; whereas the Egyptian
provided comforts for the long, long rest, that, according to his