On a question of fact as to the effect of the common funeral arrangements on the imagination, the testimony of a poet, whose accuracy of description is universally admitted, may be cited. The Rev. Mr. Crabbe thus describes the effect of the funeral array:— Lo! now what dismal sons of darkness come To bear this daughter of indulgence home! Tragedians all, and well arranged in black! Who nature, feeling, force, expression lack; Who cause no tear, but gloomily pass by, And shake their sables in the wearied eye, That turns disgusted from the pompous scene, Proud without grandeur, with profusion mean! The tear for kindness past affection owes; For worth deceased the sigh from reason flows; E’en well-feigned passions for our sorrows call, And real tears for mimic miseries fall: But this poor farce has neither truth nor art, To please the fancy or to touch the heart. * * * * * Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumb’rous scene;— Presents no objects tender or profound, But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around. * * * * * When woes are feigned, how ill such forms appear; And oh! how needless when the woe’s sincere. _The Parish Register._ Footnote 23: Amongst the higher classes the tendency is to reduce the number of cases in which mourning is worn, and to diminish the time of wearing it. It would be a great boon to persons in inferior condition and of limited means, who are governed by the examples of those above them, and who are put to ruinous expense for putting a whole family into mourning, at a time when the expense can be the least spared, if the custom could be further altered to the wearing of a piece of crape only on the hat or on the arm, as in the army and navy; or by limiting the wearing of full mourning to the head of the family, and using only crape bands for the rest. Some conception may be formed of the inconvenience incurred by the extent to which mourning is carried, even amongst the poorest classes, if we suppose that on such occasions it were necessary to clothe the whole of the men of the army and navy in black. The very excess of deaths above a healthy standard in Great Britain necessitates mourning to nearly forty thousand families per annum. The extent to which custom has carried mourning appears to have no Scriptural authority. Bingham, speaking of the primitive Christians, states, “that they did not condemn the notion of going into a mourning habit for the dead, nor yet much approve of it, but left it to all men’s liberty as an indifferent thing, rather commending those that either omitted it wholly, or in short time laid it aside again, as acting more according to the bravery and philosophy