purpose should often clash with another—that burials _in_ church should clash with burials _out_ of it—that clergymen should be hurried, discomposed, and exhausted—and mourners kept waiting in a cold, damp burial-ground, so as to verify the old objection urged by the Puritans against our service there, that “in burying the dead we kill the living.” On other days, too, the clergy have other engagements, so as to render it necessary to appoint burials for a particular hour—an appointment, however, often more necessary to the clergy than agreeable to the undertakers and their employers. And yet, with every precaution, the clergyman is most seriously incommoded; for, however he may try to accommodate, by allowing parties to fix their own hour of burial, his time and patience are fearfully encroached upon. Burials are very seldom punctual. They arrive from 20 minutes up to an hour and a half after the hour fixed. Mourners linger at home over their cups. The undertaker pleads that he “couldn’t get them to move.” Sometimes he has another “job” in hand elsewhere—nay, an undertaker has had two “jobs” in my own burial ground—he has fixed them for the same hour; yet, after having, with my assistance, completed one of them, he has coolly left me to wait till he could fetch the other; so that, what with wasted time, exhausted patience, and trials of temper owing to incivility and other annoyances from such persons as a clergyman is thus brought into contact with, he has, to say the least, as much inconvenience as the public have to complain of. Among the inconveniences which the necessities of our parochial system impose upon the working-classes, may be mentioned the practice just now alluded to, viz., the omission of the _in_-church service in all cases where it is not specially paid for. Looking at my parishioners in a religious light, and at a moment when all ranks and conditions are literally levelled in the dust, I feel this to be an invidious distinction between rich and poor; and I think it but natural that the poor should prefer burial in places where such a distinction is less strongly marked. In another part of his highly important communication, he observes— In the course of my remarks I have adverted to our inadequate parochial provision for the burial of the dead in populous places, and to the consequent inconvenience which has placed the churchyard in unfavourable contrast with the dissenting ground. There is another inconvenience, however, which attaches to both, and which is inseparable from the burial of the dead in a crowded population: I mean the impossibility of maintaining a due solemnity on such an occasion.