to defend it from dishonours at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good things in the time of its union. If Cæsar were chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most decently, every burial society may be considered as a club of Cæsars. Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people, a generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which pauper funerals are conducted in this metropolis. The coffin nothing but a few naked planks, coarsely put together, the want of a pall (that decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes from us), the coloured coats of the men that are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body,-altogether give the notion of the deceased having been some person of an ill-life and conversation, some one who may not claim the entire rites of Christian burial,-one by whom some parts of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him. I meet these meagre processions sometimes in the streets. They are sure to make me out of humour and melancholy all the day after. They have a harsh and ominous aspect. If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton's, Stonecutter's Street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to find that the six pairs of gloves are to be returned, that they are only lent, or, as the bill expresses it, for use on the occasion. The hoods, scarfs, and hatbands may properly enough be given up after the solemnity: the cloaks no gentlemen would think of keeping; but a pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not in courtesy to be re-demanded. The wearer should certainly have the fee-simple of them. The cost would be but trifling, and they would be a proper memorial of the day. This part of the proposal wants reconsidering. It is not conceived in the same liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also a little doubtful whether the limit within which the burial fee is made payable should not be extended to thirty shillings. Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in favour of those well-intentioned persons and well-wishers to the fund who, having all along paid their subscriptions regularly, are so unfortunate as to die before the six months which would entitle them to their freedom are quite completed. One can hardly imagine a more distressing case than that of a poor fellow lingering on in a consumption till the perio of his freedom is almost in sight, and then finding himself going with a velocity which makes it doubtful whether he shall be entitled to his funeral honours, his quota to which he nevertheless squeezes out, to the diminution of the comforts which sickness demands. I think, in such cases, some of the contribution-money ought to revert. With some such modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these proposals of Mr. Middleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; and heartily recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in either sex, who are willing that this perishable part of them should quit the scene of its mortal activities with as handsome circumstances possible. Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal, which they may be apt to take at the place whence these propo sals purport to be issued. From the sign of the "First and the Last,” they may conclude that Mr. Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling a club of this description at his house, may have a sinister end of his own, altogether foreign to the solemn purpose for which the club is pretended to be instituted. I must set them right by informing them that the issuer of these proposals is no publican, though he hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals, who, by the device of a cradle and a coffin, connecting both ends of human existence together, has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate that the framers of these first and last receptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt them, and that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, in strict propriety, go for nothing—an awful and instructive lesson to human vanity. Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance, and appear to have been written about the beginning of the last century, I stumbled, among the rest, upon the following short essay, which the writer calls "The Character of an Undertaker." It is written with some stiffness and peculiarities of style, but some parts of it, I think, not inaptly characterise the profession to which Mr. Middleton has the honour to belong. The writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining character of Sable, in Steele's excellent comedy of the "Funeral." 66 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. "He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies, grand marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the body, over which he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment that the breath has taken leave to that of its final commitment to the earth. His ministry begins where the physician's, the lawyer's, and the divine's end. Or if some part of the functions of the latter run parallel with his, it is only in ordine ad spiritualia. His temporalities remain unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all questions of honour which may concern the defunct; and upon slight inspection will pronounce how long he may remain in this upper world with credit to himself, and when it will be prudent for his reputation to retire. His determination in these points is peremptory and without appeal. Yet, with a modesty peculiar to his profession, he meddles not out of his own sphere. With the good or bad actions of the deceased in his lifetime he has nothing to do. He leaves the friends of the dead man to form their own conjectures as to the place to which the departed spirit is gone. His care is only about the exuviæ. He concerns not himself even about the body, as it is a structure of parts internal and a wonderful microcosm. He leaves such curious speculations to the anatomy professor. Or, if anything, he is averse to such wanton inquiries, as delighting rather that the parts which he has care of should be returned to their kindred dust in as handsome and unmutilated a condition as possible; that the grave should have its full and unimpaired tribute, a complete and just carcass. Nor is he only careful to provide for the body's entireness, but for its accommodation and ornament. He orders the fashion of its clothes and designs the symmetry of its dwelling. Its vanity has an innocent survival in him. He is bedmaker to the dead. The pillows which he lays never rumple. The day of interment is the theatre in which he displays the mysteries of his art. It is hard to describe what he is, or rather to tell what he is not, on that day for being neither kinsman, servant, or friend, he is all in turns ; anscendent, running through all those relations. His office is to supply the place of self-agency in the family, who are presumed incapable of it through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands to the whole household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners but he must minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by a less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a sort of ephemeral majordomo! He distributes his attentions among the company assembled according to the degree of affliction, which he calculates to the degree of kin from the deceased, and marshals them accordingly in the procession. He himself is of a sad and tristful countenance, yet such as (if well examined) is not without some show of patience and resignation at bottom: prefiguring, as it were, to the friends of the deceased what their grief shall be when the hand of Time shall have softened and taken down the bitterness of their first anguish; so handsomely can he foreshape and anticipate the work of Time. Lastly, with his wand, as with another divining rod, he calculates the depth of earth at which the bones of the dead man may rest, which he ordinarily contrives may be at such a distance from the surface of this earth as may frustrate the profane attempts of such as would violate his repose, yet sufficiently on this side the centre to give his friends hopes of an easy and practicable resurrection. And here we leave him, casting in dust to dust, which is the last friendly office that he undertakes to do." Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among graves, and worms, and epitaphs, I am, sir, your humble servant, MORITURUS. EDAX ΟΝ ΑΡΡΕΤΙΤΕ. To the Editor of the "Reflector." I AM going to lay before you a case of the most iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suffered. You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it must. My sufferings, then, have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite ! Not for wealth, not for vast possessions,-then might I have hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets,those verba et voces which Horace speaks of Quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem. Not for glory, not for fame, not for applause,-for against this disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has chosen to render it Rhymes which, fresh and fresh applied, Nor yet for pleasure properly so called: the strict and virtuous lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents,-a pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,-I trust have rendered me sufficiently secure on that side. No, sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest and least metaphorical sense,-an appetite for food. The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days I cannot go back far enough to remember, only I have been told that, my mother's constitution not admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care of me for that purpose used to make most extravagant demands for my pretended excesses in that kind, which my parents, rather than believe anything unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and mercenary disposition of that sort of people. This blindness continued on their part after I was sent for home, up to the period when it was thought proper, on account of my advanced age, that I should mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to a boarding-school. Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The prying republic of which a great school consists soon found me out there was no shifting the blame any longer upon other people's shoulders, no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, besides the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings and cold pies strangely missing. The truth was but too manifest in my looks, in the evident signs of inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows, the mark against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri natus,—Ventri deditus,— Vesana gula,-Escarum gurges,─Dapibus indulgens,-Non dans fræna gula,-Sectans lauta fercula mênæs, resounded wheresoever I passed. I led a weary life, suffering the penalties of guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days come again, and the horror I used to feel when, in some silent corner retired from the notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of considerate friends, and have ached at heart because I could not spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some favourite boy ;-for, if I know my own heart, I was never selfish,-never possessed a luxury which I did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood in my veins as have parted that with my companions. Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever we should grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my school-days had their end; I was once more restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of concealing even from myself the infirmity which haunted me. I was continually told that I was growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be com plimented upon it. But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but alas! I did not cease my demands for alimentary sustenance. Those times are long since passed, and with them have ceased to exist the fond concealment, the indulgent blindness, the delicate overlooking, the compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance that which appetite demands is set down to the account of gluttony, a sin which my whole soul abhors, nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit. I am constitutionally disabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments and the supernaturally replenished cup of old Baucis ; and be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that continence. What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality and the social meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavoury jests. "Double-meal" is another name which my acquaintances have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put in practice for some time without being found out, which was going the round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive feeders among them, who take their dinner about one o'clock, and so successively dropping in upon the next and the next, till by the time I got among my more fashionable intimates, whose hour was six or seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they account of dinners) at one person's house. Since I have been found out, I endeavour to make up my damper, as I call it, at home before I go out. But alas with me increase of appetite truly grows by what it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at those dinner-parties is the senseless custom of cheese and the dessert afterwards. I have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate aliment for human creatures since the Flood, as I take it to be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I remember a pretty apologue which Mandeville tells very much to this purpose in his Fable of the Bees :-He brings in a lion arguing with a merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding. The lion thus retorts" Savage I am; but no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity. |