The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
I look with pleasure at the neatly cut walks and grass. I peep in
at a window of the church, and think how I am to finish my sermon
for next Sunday. I read over the inscriptions on the stones which
mark where seven of my predecessors sleep. I look vacantly at the
lichens and moss which have overgrown certain tombstones three
or four centuries old. And occasionally I think of what and where
I shall be, when the village mason, whistling cheerfully at his
task, shall cut out my name and years on the stone which will mark
my last resting-place. But all these, of course, are commonplace
thoughts, just what would occur to anybody else, and really not
worth repeating.
And yet, although 'death, and the house appointed for all living,'
form a topic which has been treated by innumerable writers, from
the author of the book of Job to Mr. Dickens; and although the
subject might well be vulgarized by having been, for many a day,
the stock resort of every commonplace aimer at the pathetic; still
the theme is one which never can grow old. And the experience and
the heart of most men convert into touching eloquence even the
poorest formula of set phrases about the tremendous Fact. Nor are
we able to repress a strong interest in any account of the multitude
of fashions in which the mortal part of man has been disposed of,
after the great change has passed upon it. In a volume entitled
God's Acre, written by a lady, one Mrs. Stone, and published a year
or two since, you may find a great amount of curious information
upon such points: and after thinking of the various ways of burial
described, I think you will return with a feeling of home and
of relief to the quiet English country churchyard. I should think
that the shocking and revolting description of the burning of the
remains of Shelley, published by Mr. Trelawney, in his Last Days
of Shelhy and Byron, will go far to destroy any probability of
the introduction of cremation in this country, notwithstanding the
ingenuity and the eloquence of the little treatise published about
two years ago by a Member of the College of Surgeons, whose gist
you will understand from its title, which is Burning the Dead; or,
Urn-Sepulture Religiously, Socially, and Generally considered; with
Suggestions for a Revival of the Practice, as a Sanitary Measure.
The choice lies between burning and burying: and the latter being
universally accepted in Britain, it remains that it be carried
out in the way most decorous as regards the deceased, and most
soothing to the feelings of surviving friends. Every one has seen
burying-places of all conceivable kinds, and every one knows how
prominent a feature they form in the English landscape. There is
the dismal corner in the great city, surrounded by blackened walls,
where scarce a blade of grass will grow, and where the whole thing
is foul and pestilential. There is the ideal country churchyard,
like that described by Gray, where the old elms and yews keep watch
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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