Who am I, that should challenge you—do you ask? My mother was a sailor’s daughter, so please you; one of my aunts was a baker’s wife—the other, a tanner’s; and I don’t know much more about my family, except that there used to be a greengrocer of the name in a small shop near the Crystal Palace. Something of my early and vulgar life, if it interests you, I will tell in next Fors: in this one, it is indeed my business, poor gipsy herald as I am, to bring you such challenge, though you shall hunt and hang me for it. Squires, are you, and not Workmen, nor Labourers, do you answer next? Yet, I have certainly sometimes seen engraved over your family vaults, and especially on the more modern tablets, those comfortful words, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” But I observe that you are usually content, with the help of the village stone-mason, to say only this concerning your dead; and that you but rarely venture to add the “yea” of the Spirit, “that they may rest from their Labours, and their Works do follow them.” Nay, I am not even sure that many of you clearly apprehend the meaning of such followers and following; nor, in the most pathetic funeral sermons, have I heard the matter made strictly intelligible to your hope. For indeed, though you have always graciously considered your church no less essential a part of your establishment than your stable, you have only been solicitous that there should be no broken-winded steeds in the one, without collateral endeavour to find clerks for the other in whom the breath of the Spirit should be unbroken also. As yet it is a text which, seeing how often we would fain take the comfort of it, surely invites explanation. The implied difference between those who die in the Lord, and die—otherwise; the essential distinction between the labour from which these blessed ones rest, and the work which in some mysterious way follows them; and the doubt—which must sometimes surely occur painfully to a sick or bereaved squire—whether the labours of his race are always severe enough to make rest sweet, or the works of his race always distinguished enough to make their following superb,—ought, it seems to me, to cause the verse to glow on your (lately, I observe, more artistic) tombstones, like the letters on Belshazzar’s wall; and with the more lurid and alarming light, that this “following” of the works is distinctly connected, in the parallel passage of Timothy, with “judgment” upon the works; and that the kinds of them which can securely front such judgment, are there said to be, in some cases, “manifest beforehand,” and, in no case, ultimately obscure.