of relief to the quiet English country churchyard. I should think
that the shocking and revolting description of the burning of the
remains of Shelley, published by Mr. Trelawney, in his Last Days
of Shelhy and Byron, will go far to destroy any probability of
the introduction of cremation in this country, notwithstanding the
ingenuity and the eloquence of the little treatise published about
two years ago by a Member of the College of Surgeons, whose gist
you will understand from its title, which is Burning the Dead; or,
Urn-Sepulture Religiously, Socially, and Generally considered; with
Suggestions for a Revival of the Practice, as a Sanitary Measure.
The choice lies between burning and burying: and the latter being
universally accepted in Britain, it remains that it be carried
out in the way most decorous as regards the deceased, and most
soothing to the feelings of surviving friends. Every one has seen
burying-places of all conceivable kinds, and every one knows how
prominent a feature they form in the English landscape. There is
the dismal corner in the great city, surrounded by blackened walls,
where scarce a blade of grass will grow, and where the whole thing
is foul and pestilential. There is the ideal country churchyard,
like that described by Gray, where the old elms and yews keep watch
over the graves where successive generations of simple rustics have
found their last resting-place, and where in the twilight the owls
hoot from the tower of the ivy-covered church. There is the bare
enclosure, surrounded by four walls, and without a tree, far up the
lonely Highland hill-side; and more lonely still, the little gray
stone, rising above the purple heather, where rude letters, touched
up by Old Mortality's hands, tell that one, probably two or three,
rest beneath, who were done to death for what they firmly believed
was their Redeemer's cause, by Claverhouse or Dalyell. There is
the churchyard by the bleak sea-shore, where coffins have been laid