I will own that the view of the great cemetery of the capital of France displeased, and even disgusted me; and that the law in regard to this matter appeared to me a scheme of irreligious legislators for putting out of sight all that might remind them of death, and for desecrating church-yards, and for rooting out of the minds of the people their veneration for ancient usages and consecrated places. An enclosure, destined to the uses of a church-yard, turned into a flower-garden,--or a flower-garden, still retaining its finery, turned into a church-yard;--monuments surmounted, not by the symbol of salvation, but by vases in which no ashes were contained, and which are absurd in a place where bodies are not burned, but buried;--inscriptions, which spoke not of eternity, but were such as if the person beneath had died without hope or fear,--all this offended me. The provisions of the law of burial, which does not allow families to repose together even in death, since each corpse must take its place in the row or line,--this law, which destroys all sepulchral memorials of families or individuals,--(for if the land be restored to cultivation the sepulchres cannot well be preserved,) all this shocked my habitual notions and ancient prejudices. Yet what can be more dangerous to the health of a great city, than that, in every populous part of it, there should be a small enclosure, containing, at a little depth under ground, dead bodies in every stage of putrefaction,--a dunghill of most noxious exhalation, slightly covered with mould? How much is this danger increased by the contagious, (I was going to say pestilential, but it is now doubted whether pestilence be contagious or not,) by the contagious nature of many diseases! What can be more indecent, and at the same time dangerous, than that, at the digging of a grave, bodies should be disturbed before they are assimilated to the dust to which they are committed, and that skulls and other bones should be thrown out for play-things to thoughtless children? Such things I have seen, and so has every man who has been present at the digging of a grave in any town in England; such things are even represented on the stage, to the disgrace of our national character, for the sake of the grave-diggers' puns, and an ingenious moralizing on the skull of Yorick. Custom reconciles us to things in themselves most shocking. Medea might have slain her children _coram populo_, if the people had been used to it. They _were_ used to gladiators.