"UNDERTAKER. Let him come in. "_Enter_ GRAVE-DIGGER. "GRAVE-DIGGER. I carried home to your house the shroud the gentleman was buried in last night; I could not get his ring off very easilly, therefore I brought you the finger and all; and, sir, the sexton gives his service to you, and desires to know whether you'd have any bodies removed or not: if not, he'll let them be in their graves a week longer. "UNDERTAKER. Give him my service; I can't tell readilly: but our friend, Dr. Passeport, with the powder, has promised me six or seven funerals this week." * * * * * These extracts are not from the manuscript of a modern farce-comedy,[A] but belong to Steele's play of "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode." If they have about them all the air of _fin-de-siècle_ wit, so much the more eloquently do they testify to the freshness of Dick's satire. Freshness, satire, and death! Surely the three ingredients seem unmixable; yet when poured into the crucible of Steele's genius they resulted in a crystal that sparkled delightfully amid the lights of a theatre--a crystal which might still shed brilliancy if some enterprising manager would exhibit it to a jaded public. [Footnote A: In "A Milk White Flag," a good specimen of "up-to-date" farce, Mr. Hoyt dallies entertainingly and discreetly with the blithesome topics of undertakers, corpses, and widows.] In "The Funeral" the author impaled, with many a merciless slash of the pen, the hypocrisy and vulgar flummery that characterised the whole gruesome ceremony of conducting to its earthly resting-place the body of a well-to-do sinner. For the average Englishman loved a funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the burial of his friends with the mockery, rather than the sincerity, of woe.