Pluralist who occupies three houses and
locks up in his cash-box three clergymen's
incomes, is not the man whose pity can
console them most effectually, or whose advice
(that they should eke their livings out by
cleaving to a vested interest in what their
countrymen declare to be abominable and
corrupt) is most likely to be welcome to their
ears. For which reasons we hold that the
satirist of the aforesaid ecclesiastical
association, has most bitterly and cruelly attacked
its credit.

He has done wrong also to the body of the
London clergy, who, during all the inquiries
of late years into the state of their town
churchyards, declared frankly, with but very
few exceptions, that they were unwholesome,
even in a religious point of view. The
supposed archdeacon is made to talk, also, of
that solemnity which was wont to attend
the walking funeral from the poor man's
residence to his parish church. Upon this
head what is the feeling of the London
clergy? Conspicuous among sound churchmen
there is a dean who, as a scholar and
a poet, should have no very mean perception
on a point of sense and feeling. "A
funeral procession," says Dean Milman,
"through the streets of a great and busy town,
can scarcely be made impressive. Not even
the hearse in gorgeous gloom, with all the
pomp of heraldry, and followed by the
carriages of half the nobility in the land, will
arrest for an instant the noise and confusion
of our streets, or awaken any deeper impression
with the mass than idle curiosity. While
the poor man, borne on the shoulders of men
as poor as himself, is jostled off the pavement,
the mourners, at some crossing, are either in
danger of being run over or separated from
the body; in the throng of passers no sign of
reverence, no stirring of conscious mortality
in the heart." What is this but a just
expression of the simple knowledge of every
man, woman, and child in London competent
to observe what passes in the streets? The
consciousness of an indifferent, unsympathising
crowd, disturbs and distracts the mourner,
throws constraint over the expression of his
grief, diverts his thoughts from that inward
contemplation of the heavenly mansion to
which the lost friend has been led, and as a
denizen of which—not as a denizen of the
grave—it is the instinct, as well as the sacred
duty, of the Christian mourner to cherish
him in thought. The archdeacon is, by his
merciless enemy, represented as setting aside
for unsubstantial all considerations of this
kind. "To bury the dead in places apart from
human habitation," he is made to say, "is to
overwhelm their memories in darkness; it is
the putting the candle under the bushel
instead of in the candlestick; it is a forbidding
the light of the noble, the wise, and the good,
who are departed, so to shine before men,
that they may remember their good works,
and be excited to follow their example."

What! is the light left by the wise and
righteous a corpse-candle, and nothing more?
Do we lose all when we lose their material
dust and ashes? Certainly we do, the satirist
would make us believe that the archdeacon
thinks. The object of his discourse is said to
be "to avert from my church and country as
great an evil as can befal us—the neglect of
the dead and loss of their example," by the
loss of burial fees at St. Giles's, Cripplegate,
and other churches having graveyards set
among the crowded dwellings of the poor.

Of course the satirist understood that a
rich pluralist was not likely to demean
himself by personally burying a pauper, and
that he might fairly be represented as not
knowing that the parish church itself is
not for persons of that class. The
archdeacon is, indeed, shown as dwelling, in
one part of his charge, on the comfort it
must be to persons who cannot go to church
themselves, on account of their shabby
clothing, to know that they have relatives
buried in or near the building; but he,
apparently, does not know that the burial
service is not read within the church walls
over paupers—that their bodies go straight
to the grave. He is represented as eloquent,
however, upon the privilege of interment
near the church, speaking of Kensal Green as
of a place far away in some wide desert,
saying that there is hardly a village or
hamlet in England which does not contain
men and women around whose graves crowds
will not willingly assemble to deplore their
loss, and summing up accordingly with this
inquiry—"If the places allotted for the
dead be no longer places of concourse, is
it not manifest that all those lessons—
lessons the value of which even the Heathen
understood—will be no longer taught?" If
such a charge were solemnly delivered to the
London clergy in a sacred building, they
must be supposed to know that the close
London graveyards really are frequented
by deploring crowds; that it would be a
Christian sight if they were so, and would
speak well for the efficacy of our faith in
a more spiritual life than that which is put
off with this gross body. But the common
belief of Londoners who pass to and fro
daily before the old reeking graveyards, is
utterly the reverse—that they are of all
lonely places the most utterly deserted.
From one of them, now closed, a visitor
brought this description home:—

A long narrow strip, not above ten or twelve feet in
width, between tlie walls of the church on one side,
and the rears of some old dirty houses in Cloth-fair,
which in some parts overhang the ground, on the
other. To a stranger it has all the appearance of a
filthy backyard, common to several low and filthy
houses. The surface is strewed with cabbage leaves,
parings of turnips, fish-bones, and other sorts of rubbish,
with large splashes of filthy water that had
been recently emptied from some adjacent window.
There ie a large pile of hencoops at one end, and there