SHAKESPEARE'S BONES.



The sentiment which affects survivors in the disposition of their
dead, and which is, in one regard, a superstition, is, in another, a
creditable outcome of our common humanity: namely, the desire to
honour the memory of departed worth, and to guard the "hallowed
reliques" by the erection of a shrine, both as a visible mark of
respect for the dead, and as a place of resort for those pilgrims
who may come to pay him tribute. It is this sentiment which dots
our graveyards with memorial tablets and more ambitious sculptures,
and which still preserves so many of our closed churchyards from
desecration, and our {1a} ancient tombs from the molestation of
careless, curious, or mercenary persons.

But there is another sentiment, not inconsistent with this, which
prompts us, on suitable occasions, to disinter the remains of great
men, and remove them to a more fitting and more honourable resting-
place. The Hotel des Invalides at Paris, and the Basilica of San
Lorenzo Fuori le Mura at Rome, {1b} are indebted to this sentiment
for the possession of relics which make those edifices the natural
resort of pilgrims as of sight-seers. It were a work of superfluity
to adduce further illustration of the position that the mere
exhumation and reinterment of a great man's remains, is commonly
held to be, in special cases, a justifiable proceeding, not a
violation of that honourable sentiment of humanity, which protects