It may console those in whom lingers, from old association, almost a religious prejudice in favour of churchyards, to be reminded that some of the most eminent Christians, both lay and clerical, have earnestly pleaded for extramural cemeteries. Evelyn—the model of a Christian gentleman—regretted that after the Fire of London advantage had not been taken of that calamity to rid the city of its burial-places, and establish a necropolis without the walls. ‘I yet cannot but deplore,’ says he, in his ‘Silva,’ ‘that when that spacious area was so long a _rasa tabula_, the churchyards had not been banished to the north walls of the city, where a grated inclosure of competent breadth for a mile in length, might have served for an universal cemetery to all the parishes, distinguished by the like separations, and with ample walks of trees, the walks adorned with monuments, inscriptions, and titles, apt for contemplation and memory of the defunct, and that wise and excellent law of the Twelve Tables renewed.’ The pious Sir Thomas Browne says quaintly in his ‘Hydriotaphia,’ ‘To live indeed is to be again ourselves; which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.’ Would it not then be well to reflect, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, whether any of the best, whether the very worst custom—considering the state of society in which it has obtained—is so extraordinary and degrading as that of burying the dead in the midst of the living, to generate an amount of human destruction, compared with which the slaughter attendant on an African funeral is as a drop of water in an ocean. It should be remembered that, in the barbarous customs we have cited there is always to be traced the perversion of an idea:—as that the dead man will want food, passage money, attendants, beasts of burden, something that benighted ignorance is unable to separate from the wants incidental to this earthly state. There is no such poor excuse for the custom into which this civilised age has insensibly lapsed, until its evils have become too great to bear. The affection which endures beyond the grave is surely more fitly associated with a tomb in a beautiful solitude than amidst the clamour and clatter of a city’s streets. If, in submission to that moral law of gravitation, which renders it difficult to separate our thoughts of those who have departed from some lingering association with this earth, we desire to find a resting-place for our dead which we can visit, and where we may hope to lie when our own time shall come, reason and imagination alike suggest its being in a spot serenely sacred to that last repose of so much of us as is mortal, where natural decay may claim kindred with nature, in her beautiful succession of