applied to Public Cemeteries. 105 



architecture, sculpture, landscape-gardening, arboriculture, botany, and in 

 those important parts of general gardening, neatness, order, and high keeping. 

 Some of the new London cemeteries might be referred to as answering in 

 some degree these various purposes, and more particular!}' the Abney Park 

 Cemetery ; which contains a grand entrance in Egyptian architecture ; a 

 handsome Gothic chapel; a number, daily increasing, of sculptural monuments; 

 and one of the most complete arboretums in the neighbourhood of London, 

 all the trees and shrubs being named. In summer there are a number of 

 beds filled with flowers of various kinds, and the whole is kept with great 

 neatness and order. We do not, however, approve of various points in the 

 arrangement of the trees and shrubs in this cemetery, nor of the form of the 

 beds containing the flowers, though we admit that the management in these 

 particulars is better than it is in most of the other cemeteries. But this sub- 

 ject will be considered more in detail in division VIL 



Churchyards and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the 

 morals and the taste, and by their botanical riches to cultivate the intellect, 

 but they serve as historical records. This is the case with the religious 

 temples and burial-grounds, in all ages and in all countries. The country 

 churchyard was formerly the country labourer's only library, and to it was 

 limited his knowledge of history, chronology, and biography ; every grave 

 was to him a page, and every head-stone or tomb a picture or an engraving. 

 With the progress of education and refinement, this part of the uses of 

 churchyards is not superseded, but only extended and improved. It is still to 

 the poor man a local history and biography, though the means of more ex- 

 tended knowledge are now amply furnished by the diff'usion of cheap publi- 

 cations, which will at no distant time, it is to be hoped, be rendered still more 

 effective by the establishment of a system of national education. " A garden 

 cemetery and monumental decoration," our eloquent author observes, " afford 

 the most convincing tokens of a nation's progress in civilisation and in the 

 arts which are its result. We have seen with what pains the most celebrated 

 nations of which history speaks have adorned their places of sepulture, and 

 it is from their funereal monuments that we gather much that is known of 

 their civil progress and of their advancement in taste. Is not the story of 

 Egypt written on its pyramids, and is not the chronology of Arabia pictured 

 on its tombs ? Is it not on the funeral relics of Greece and Rome that we 

 behold those elegant images of repose and tender sorrow with which they so 

 happily invested the idea of death ? Is it not on the urns and sarcophagi of 

 Etruria that the lover of the noble art of sculpture still gazes with delight ? 

 And is it not amid the catacombs, the crypts, and the calvaries of Italy, that 

 the sculptor and the painter of the dark ages chiefly present the most 

 splendid specimens of their chisel and their pencil ? In modern days, also, 

 has it not been at the shrine of death that the highest efforts of the Michael 

 Angelos, the Canovas, the Thorwaldsens, and the Chantreys, have been 

 elicited and exhibited ? The tomb has, in fact, been the great chronicler of 

 taste throughout the world. In the East, from the hoary pyramid to the 

 modern Arab's grave ; in Europe, from the rude tomb of the druid to the 

 marble mausoleum of the monarch ; in America, from the grove which the 

 Indian chief planted round the sepulchre of his son, to the monument which 

 aimounces to the lovers of freedom the last resting-place of Washington." 

 (^Necropolis Glasguensis, p. 63.) 



Such are the various important uses of the cemetery and the churchyard, 

 which it was necessary to take into consideration, before devising either a 

 design for laying out a cemetery, or a system of rules and regulations for its 

 working and management. 



(Tb be continued.) 



