craven at heart;" or, "I am naturally
prodigiously stingy and mean."

Now, it is a curious fact that this self-accusatory
habit into which so many individuals among
us fall is possessed by us also to some extent as
a nation. We English people stand almost
alone among the nations of the earth in our
practice of habitual and liberal self-censure.
We are always taking ourselves to task, pointing
out our own defects, calling upon all men to
observe them, and showing how much better
matters are administered in other countries.
"Our town is ill administered," we say; as
indeed it is; "We have no government;" "Our
cabs and omnibuses are a disgrace to
civilisation."

It is probable that neither in the individual
nor in the nation does all this mean much,
indeed it cannot mean much, or we should carry
our heads lower than we do; but mean it much,
or mean it little, certain it is that this habit of
self-depreciation belongs to us, and that in no
respect is it more powerfully developed than in
relation to matters of a decorative kind, and
such as are connected with our public buildings,
monuments, gardens, and other similar institutions.
Here, indeed, we are ready to confess
ourselves abject in the last degree; and not
without cause.

Still there is hope for us. Within the last
few years we have been moving in the right
direction. We have built larger houses, with
more pretensions at any rate of a decorative
sort. We have constructed pretty flower-gardens
in our Parks, and in other ways shown a
desire to improve our public places,—nay, an
attempt has even been made of late to do
something with our cemeteries, so that these, our last
resting-places, shall present something less
monotonous and distressing to the eye than the old
combination of rank grass and grim
undecorated gravestone with which we were so
long contented.

It would be difficult to conceive anything
more repulsive and more hopeless than the old
London churchyard, now fallen into disuse, but
of which there may still be found many specimens
in and about the metropolis and suburbs.
Take as metropolitan instances the two enclosures
on either side of Paddington-street, at the
back of the Marylebone workhouse, or that one
near to Tyburn, and belonging to the parish of
St. George, Hanover-square. They are simply
horrible. No other word can express the aversion
which such places inspire. There is no
attempt to present death under its softer and less
terrible aspect. Long rows of grim ungainly
upright stones, relieved here and there by a
square edifice, like a huge tea-caddy, stand
there in unmitigated ugliness, suggesting
only the darkest side of the picture—death in
its most hideous and squalid form—and such as
we have known and feared it from our earliest
days.

The ornamentation and the general look of
the modern cemetery is a vast improvement on
those dreadful old burying-grounds. It is chiefly
with the view of marking every indication of
improvement in this way, and of suggesting
how it may be carried further, that these few
notes on churchyard sculpture are here set
down.

In some of our cemeteries of the longest
standing, the old and the new kind of monument
may be seen close together, and compared.
There, will be found the older graves marked
with the common ugly head-stone, the square
brick tomb with the stone slab, and the narrow
stone grave, shaped something like a coffin.
There, also, will be observable two other kinds
of monument, much in use, and finding, or having
once found, marked and special favour in English
eyes—two very ungainly and unmeaning
monstrosities—the obelisk and the urn.

Whence, in the name of all that is most
incongruous and most inappropriate on earth, this
popularity of the obelisk and the urn! There
are thousands of these in our cemeteries. The
writer, in one of our principal cemeteries, paused
for a moment, and without moving from the spot
of ground on which he stood, counted forty-four
urns at a glance. The spot was chosen at
haphazard, and was not in a commanding situation.
Let the reader judge of it for himself. Let
him visit one of our cemeteries where there is
raised ground, as at Highgate, and let him
survey what is before him from an elevation.
He will see such incredible numbers of these
urns and obelisks as would lead him to the
belief, if he did not know better, that they
were the insignia of England's religion. Now,
how is this to be accounted for? The urn
has some connexion of the ancient heathen sort
with the ashes of the dead. In countries where,
and in the time when, the bodies of the dead
were consumed by fire, the ashes left after
incremation, collected and placed in an urn, were,
as everybody knows, preserved. But now, when
those mortal remains are, as is patent to all
men, buried underground, what significance have
these wretched urns, which not only do not
contain the ashes of the dead, but are, most
probably, solid throughout, and incapable of
holding ashes or anything else?

And these sepulchral arms are draped.
Among the thousands, there are few, if any,
which are not partially veiled by a piece
of drapery. There are variations, truly, in the
manner of the cutting of the cloth; sometimes
it is in two formal festoons, with the ends passed
through the handles of the vessel; sometimes it
covers nearly the whole urn with its folds;
sometimes it is thrown over the vase in a careless
loose style, at the sculptor's discretion;
but it is always, or almost always there, and has
got to be regarded, doubtless, in the light of a
pious emblematical decoration, just as the
inverted torch has got to be looked upon as a
type of death, in spite of the fact, known to
every one who has ever lighted a lucifer match,
that if you hold any ignited object downward, it
burns brighter than ever.

But the obelisk in this country, where no
symbolism such as it may have had among
Eastern nations attaches to it, and where no
cabalistic signs are inscribed upon its surface,