applied to Public Cemeteries. 103 



people of every nation, of every condition, of every age, and of every religion, 

 are found congregated. The Russ sleeps next to the Spaniard, the Protestant 

 next the Catholic, the Jew next the Turk. Individuals the most dissimilar 

 when alive, in faith, in feeling, in practice, are here reconciled amid the 

 peace-making dust of the sepulchre." (Necropolis Glasguensis, p. 32.) 



" A garden cemetery and monumental decoration are not only beneficial to 

 public morals, to tlie improvement of manners, but are likewise calculated to 

 extend virtuous and generous feelings. Affliction, brightened by hope, ever 

 renders man more anxious to love his neighbour. At the brink of the grave 

 we are made most feelingly alive to the shortness and uncertainty of life, and 

 to the danger of procrastinating towards God and man whatever it is our 

 bounden duty to perform. There, too, the conscience is taught the value of 

 mercj', and best feels the recompense which awaits the just in Heaven. 

 There, the man whose heart the riches, titles, and dignities of the world have 

 swollen with pride, best experiences the vanity of all earthly distinction, and 

 humbles himself before the mournful shrine, where 



' Precedency 's a jest ; vassal and lord, 

 Grossly familiar, side by side consume.' 



There, the son whose wayward folly may have embittered the last days of a 

 father will, as he gazes on his grave, best receive the impulse that would urge 

 him, as an expiation of his crime, to perform a double duty to his surviving 

 parent. There, in fact, vice looks terrible, virtue lovely ; selfishness a sin, 

 patriotism a duty. The cemetery is, in short, the tenderest and most uncom- 

 promising monitor of man ; for, 



* When self-esteem, or other's adulation. 

 Would cunningly persuade us we were something 

 Above the common level of our kind. 

 The grave gainsays the smooth-complexion'd flattery, 

 And with blunt truth acquaints us what we are.' 



A garden cemetery is the sworn foe to preternatural fear and superstition. 

 The ancients, from their minds being never poUuted with the idea of a charnel- 

 house, nor their feelings roused by the revolting emblems of mortality, con- 

 templated death without terror, and visited its gloomy shrine without fear. 

 W^ith them death was tranquillity, and the only images that were associated 

 with it, were those of peaceful repose and tender sorrow. The names of their 

 burial-places indicate no association with terror, and call forth no feeling of 

 fear. The Ccemeterion of the Greek suggests onl}' the idea of a bed of slumber ; 

 the Bethaim of the Jew speaks but of the mansion of the living. Amid the 

 tombstones of Thermopylae, we would conceive that the Grecian heart beat no 

 less boldly at midnight than at mid-day ; while we know that the timid female, 

 during the slumber of Jerusalem, could fearlessly wander to the silent se- 

 pulchre.* Whence then did the preternatural terrors connected with death 

 arise, which so powerfully swayed the hearts of the middle and more modern 



" * Among the works of ancient art there is not to be found a single image 

 of a revolting nature connected with death. D'Israeli states that, ' to conceal 

 its deformity to the eye, as well as to elude its suggestion to the mind, seems 

 to have been a universal feeling ; and it accorded with a fundamental prin- 

 ciple of ancient art, that of never offering to the eye a distortion of form in 

 the violence of passion which destroyed the beauty of its representation ; such 

 is shown in the Laocoon, where the mouth only opens sufficiently to indicate 

 the suppressed agony of superior humanity, without expressing the loud cry of 

 vulgar suffering.' 



