In 1843, at the request of her Majesty's principal Secretary of State, for the Home Department, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, Barrister at Law, made "_a report on the results of a special inquiry into the practice of interment in towns_." This report is very severe upon our fraternity; but, I must confess, it is a most able and interesting performance, and full of curious detail. The demands of the English undertaker, it appears, are so oppressive upon the poor, that burial societies have been formed, upon the mutual principle. It is asserted by Mr. Chadwick, that parents, under the gripings of poverty, have actually poisoned their children, to obtain the burial money. At the Chester assizes, several trials, for infanticide, have occurred, on these grounds. "_That child will not live, it is in the burial club_," is a cant and common phrase, among the Manchester paupers. Some very clever impositions, have been practised, to obtain the burial allowance. A man, living in Manchester, resolved to play corpse, for this laudable object. His wife was privy to the plot, of course,--and gave notice, in proper form, of her bereavement. The agent of the society made the customary domiciliary visit. There the body lay--stiff and stark--and a very straight and proper corpse it was--the jaw decently tied up. The visitor, well convinced, and quite touched by the widow's anguish, was turning on his heel to depart, when a slight motion of the dead man's eyelid arrested his attention: he began to smell--not of the body, like the bear in Æsop--but a rat. Upon feeling the pulse, he begged the chief mourner to be comforted; there was strong ground for hope! More obstinate than Rachel, she not only would not be comforted, but abused the visitor, in good Gaelic, for questioning her veracity. Had she not laid out the daar man, her own daar Tooly Mashee, with her own hands! and didn't she know better than to be after laying him out, while the brith was in his daar buddy! and would she be guilty of so cruel a thing to her own good man! The doctor was called; and, after feeling the pulse, threw a bucket of water, in the face of the defunct, which resulted in immediate resurrection.