Now, I don’t love many people; but I do love the undertakers. I except them from the censure I pass upon you in general. They know you so well, that I look upon ’em as a sort of Ravens. They are so certain of your being gen-teel parties, that they stick at nothing. They are sure they’ve got the upper hand of you. Our proprietor was reading the paper, only last night, and there was an advertisement in it from a sensitive and libelled undertaker, to wit, that the allegation “that funerals were unnecessarily expensive, was an insult to his professional brethren.” Ha! ha! Why he knows he has you on the hip. It’s nothing to him that their being unnecessarily expensive is a fact within the experience of all of you as glaring as the sun when there’s not a cloud. He is certain that when you want a funeral “performed,” he has only to be down upon you with Mrs. Grundy, to do what he likes with you—and then he’ll go home, and laugh like a Hyæna. I declare (supposing I wasn’t detained against my will by our proprietor) that, if I had any arms, I’d take the undertakers to ’em! There’s another, in the same paper, who says they’re libelled, in the accusation of having disgracefully disturbed the meeting in favour of what you call your General Interment Bill. Our establishment was in the Strand, that night. There was no crowd of undertakers’ men there, with circulars in their pockets, calling on ’em to come in coloured clothes to make an uproar; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who got in with forged orders to yell and screech; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who made a brutal charge at the platform, and overturned the ladies like a troop of horse. Of course not. _I_ know all about it. But—and lay this well to heart, you Lords of the creation, as you call yourselves!—it _is_ these undertakers’ men to whom, in the last trying, bitter grief of life, you confide the loved and honoured forms of your sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. It _is_ to these delicate gentry, and to their solemn remarks, and decorous behaviour, that you entrust the sacred ashes of all that has been the purest to you, and the dearest to you, in this world. Don’t improve the breed! Don’t change the custom! Be true to my opinion of you, and to Mrs. Grundy! I nail the black flag of the black Jobmaster to our cage—figuratively speaking—and I stand up for the gen-teel parties. So (but from different motives) does the Owl. You’ve got a chance, by means of that bill I’ve mentioned—by the bye, I call my own a General Interment Bill, for it buries everything it gets hold of—to alter the whole system; to avail yourselves of the results of all improved European experience; to separate death from life; to surround it with everything that is sacred and solemn, and to dissever it from everything that is shocking and sordid. You won’t read the bill? You won’t dream of helping it? You won’t think of looking at the evidence on which it’s founded—Will you? No. That’s right!