100 Principles of Landscape- Gardening 



expense. Fortunately a law has been passed which renders these precautions 

 unnecessary, and we shall therefore take no farther notice of them. 



The secondary object of cemeteries, that of improving the moral feelings, will 

 be one of the results of the decorous attainment of the main object ; for it 

 must be obvious that the first step to rendering the churchyard a source of 

 amelioration or instruction is, to render it attractive. So far from this being 

 the case at present, they are in many instances the reverse, often presenting, 

 in London and other large towns, a black unearthly-looking surface, so frequently 

 disturbed by interments that no grass will grow upon it* ; while, in the country, 

 the churchyard is commonly covered with rank grass abounding in tall weeds,and 

 neglected grave-stones. Cemeteries in this state " lose their monitory virtue 

 when thus obtruded upon the notice of men occupied with the cares of the 

 world, and too often sullied and defiled by those cares." No wonder that, 

 under such circumstances, the burial-grounds, more especially of towns, are 

 shunned and avoided, rather than sought after as places for meditation. Even 

 under the most favourable circumstances, the associations which are generally 

 attached to churchyards are gloomy and terrific. 



" The Grave ! dread thing, 



Men shiver when thou 'rt named : Nature, appall'd. 

 Shakes off her wonted firmness. Ah ! how dark 

 The long extended realms and rueful wastes, 

 Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night! 



The sickly taper. 

 By glimmering through thy low-brow'd mirky vaults, 

 Furr'd round with misty damps and ropy slime. 

 Lets fall a supernumerary horror. 

 And only serves to make thy night more irksome." 



" Why," says Washington Irving, " should we thus seek to clothe death 

 with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors around the tomb of those we 

 love? The grave should be surrounded by every thing that might inspire 

 tenderness and veneration for the dead, or that might win the living to virtue. 

 It is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation." 

 " Nothing can make amends," says Coleridge, " for the want of the soothing 

 influences of nature, and for the absence of those types of renovation and 

 decay which the fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and con- 

 templative mind. To feel the force of this sentiment, let a man only compare, 

 in imagination, the unsiglitly manner in which our monuments are crowded 

 together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless churchyard of a 

 large town, with the still seclusion of a Turkish cemetery in some remote 

 place, and yet further sanctified by the grove of cypress in which it is em- 

 bosomed." {Coleridge'' s Friend.^ 



" Let us be careful, however, in our anxiety to escape from gloom and horror, 

 not to run into the opposite extreme of meretricious gaudiness. Death and 

 the grave are solemn and awful realities ; they speak with a powerful and 

 intelligible voice to the heart of every spectator, as being the common lot of 

 all. To say nothing of the bad taste, therefore, anything obtrusively pic- 

 turesque, anything savouring of fashionable prettiness, any far-fetched conceits 



* The persons living in the houses which abut on the burial-ground of Bartho- 

 lomew the Less, Dr. Lynch states, are in the habit of emptying their cham- 

 ber-pots into it; and the surface of the burial-ground of Bartholomew the 

 Great, adjoining, is so covered with the excrementitious matter floated over 

 from the cesspools of privies, that it is difficult to walk across it. There is 

 no hope of curing any person living in this quarter, when attacked by disease 

 but by removal. {Dr. Lynch, in Report, &c. p. I6L) ' 



