cemetery companies. Afterwards came the
law that no person should be buried within
a hundred yards of a house; which is
supposed to be considered by the archdeacon as
equivalent to a sending of the dead out into
the desert. He deplores the consequence of
this in affecting language:—

The church and churchyard of the parish has
hitherto been one of the strongest ties to bind the
people at large to the communion of our church. The
right of sepulture in the churchyard was a right
belonging to the poor as well as to the rich; it was their
pride to bury their dead with due honour, to have the
service read by their own minister, and large was the
amount which persons, even of the humblest rank, paid
to the parishes to secure to the surviving members of
the family the privilege of burial in the same grave.
Burial bound, I say, the people in the metropolis to
the Established Church.

Alas for the lost days of churchyard monopoly!

To recover this, or to get compensation for
the loss of it, or if neither can be done, to hurl
defiance at the persons and opinions by which
so excellent a business has been ruined, is
apparently the object of the charge. Religion
and morals are in the highest degree
imperilled, and as for your conjectures about
wholesomes and unwholesomes, there is
nothing whatever unwholesome in a putrefying
corpse. In the following passage the
satirist overshoots his mark, by carrying the
absurd too far beyond the limits of the
possible. No archdeacon could by any
possibility have risked such reputation as he may
have had by speaking in this fashion.

The terms, shocking, disgusting, disgraceful,
demoralising, are constantly applied to the presence of the
dead body in the dwelling-house, as well as to the
ordinary accidents of burial—and whilst historical
science is permitted to ransack the barrow of the Celt
or the Saxon, or to disentomb the contents of a
necropolis; and ethnology determines by the form of the
skull the race; and physiology the age and sex by the
form of the bones,—and all this is detailed with the
minutest accuracy in the philosophical journal, or the
daily newspaper, and not a word is said of disgust,—
the casting up of the skull and of the bones in a parish
grave is pronounced to be shocking to humanity, &c.

Now, surely the putrefaction of the Celts
and of the ancient Peruvians is a process
by this time pretty well complete; and as
for what dry particles remain of them, we
have entered into no most sacred contract
to respect their barrows, or their bones.
Having raised a childish argument to put
into the mouth of his enemy, the writer of
the charge knocks it down in the next
sentence, by wording afresh the complaint,
and calling the offence of society against
good morals, the refinement which expresses
strong abhorrence at the thought of turning
up a body from the grave "until
decomposition of all its parts is complete."

But what if it is putrid ? the minister of
the Most High, is represented as inquiring:

It is an easy thing to use scientific terms, such as
miasms, and gases, and deleterious emanations; and if
you talk scientifically, or appear to do so, you may
easily persuade simple-minded persons to distrust their
own experience. . . . We have a right to demand, not
opinions and presumptions, but experiments; not
conjectures about wholesomes and unwholesomes, but
facts duly attested, and deductions clearly drawn.

Well, though there are facts enough on
record to make up a modest library; facts enough
to have long since thoroughly convinced
all men who attend to other matters than
the cash-box, we will reproduce one or two
that must have been perfectly well known to
the archdeacon if he has read what he
professes to have read, and if it be really
the archdeacon who is holding such an
argument:—

The meat in butchers' shops near London
graveyards, whenever the stench becomes at
all great, taints in a single day or night, and
the taint of putrid matter is communicated to
flesh and blood not only when dead. Sir J.
MacGregor states that once in Spain, soon
after twenty thousand men had been buried
within a period of two or three months, the
troops breathing the air and drinking the
water round about the place of burial were
attacked by malignant fever and dysentery.
In the two hundred and eighteen acres of
London graveyards, a million and a half of
bodies were interred within the lifetime of
one generation. In 1841, two gravediggers
perished instantly on descending a grave in
St. Botolph's churchyard, Aldgate. Four men
went ashore in Whampoa Roads, near Canton,
to bury one of their comrades who had died
of dysentery: they happened to select a spot
for the grave in which a human body had
been buried two months previously: the
moment the spade went through the lid
of the coffin a dreadful effluvium issued
forth, and the two men engaged in the work
fell down nearly lifeless. With difficulty
their companions approached near enough to
drag them from the spot, and to fill up the
place with earth. The two men who were
thus seized gradually recovered sufficiently
to be able, with assistance, to reach the boat
and return on board their ship. By the
succeeding morning, the symptoms of
malignant pestoid fever were fully developed in
both men; of which disease one of them died
on the fourth day and the other on the morning
of the fifth. Of the other two, one had a severe
attack of fever on the eighth day; the other
a slight indisposition. Is there not evidence
enough here of the danger of foul churchyards
in the midst of dense populations?
Should anybody wish for some further idea
of a foul churchyard, here it is. Before the
graveyard belonging to St. Clement Danes
was closed and sealed with a thick seal
of asphalte, on one hot summer's day,
a grave was opened of such depth that the
remains of at least ten skeletons were
thrown up. The fœtor was then so over-
powering, "that even the beadle of the