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tume of all the persons attached to this department was regulated with as much precision as that of the Directory themselves.

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L'ordonnateur principal: habit long, veste et pantalon de drap violet; bottines; manteau court de drap noir; chapeau relevé de trois . côtés, et garni d'un plumet noir.

L'ordonnateur particulier: habit, veste et pantalon de drap noir; bottines; manteau court de drap violet: chapeau relevé par devant, et surmonté d'une aigrette violette; la forme du chapeau entourée d'un crépe noir retombant jusqu'à la ceinture; bâton d'ébène, surmonté d'une urne d'ivoire.

Le gardien du dépositoire: habit, veste et pantalon de drap gris foncé; boutons noirs; chapeau relevé par devant.

Les porteurs: veste à manches, et pantalon de drap gris foncé ; boutons et paremens noirs; bottines; manteau de drap gris descendant jusqu'au genou; collet et agraffe noirs; chapeau rond entouré d'un crêpe.

L'homme de service du dépositoire: veste è manches et pantalons de drap gris; paremens et boutons noirs; bottines.

Les conducteurs de chars: habit gris, collet, paremens et boutons noirs; gillet et pantalon noirs; bottines; chapeau rond entouré d'un crêpe.'

These regulations, apart from the foppery and irreligion which they exhibit, were in themselves good; but, like many laws from the same manufactory, they were in great part disregarded. Mr. Pinkerton, describing the funerals in the cemetery of Montmartre, at this time, says, On entering, you see to the left a sandy elevation of the natural soil, declining towards the west. The coffin is let down on the edge of this declivity to a shelf at a small depth, and covered with a few shovels-full of sand. A husband, wife, or relation, gives a parting look, sheds a few tears, and turns away. If the body came from an hospital, it is only inclosed in a sack, and borne by two men on a handbier, over which two half hoops support a linen cloth. Aware of the indecency of this slight inhumation, the sexton will not permit you to go so far as to command a view of the declivity, interspersed with coffins and sacks. But the smell is offended at the distance of forty or fifty yards, if the wind blow from the cemetery.' In 1804 an imperial decree was issued repeating the prohibition of interment in churches, or within the circuit of a town. High ground by this decree was to be chosen for cemeteries, and exposed to the north, and every corpse was to be interred in a separate grave, from a metre and a half to two metres deep, and the earth well trodden down. There was to be a certain distance between the graves, and they might not be re-opened till after five years. Another imperial decree in 1811 consigned the whole funeral business of the metropolis to one undertaker-general, arranged funerals into six classes, and appointed a

tarif whereby the expense of every separate article and assistant was determined; the sum total in either class might not be exceeded; but might be diminished if the family of the deceased chose to strike out any thing in the list. The whole expenses of the first class amount to 4282 franks; of the second to 1800; of the third to 700: the fourth to 250, the fifth to 100, and of the sixth and last only to 16. The tarif will be considered hereafter as singularly precious, if posterity should be as curious concerning the costume of the present age as we are concerning the manners and costumes of our ancestors.

The tarif may probably be observed; but in spite of the wholesome part of these regulations, the huge common graves are as much in use in the new cemeteries as they were in the old, and the great men of Buonaparte's reign were interred in the crypts of St. Geneviève. But for the new cemeteries. In all other countries the churchyards are only ornamented with crosses, or at most with some tombs, covered also with simple stones, nothing which can recommend them to the curiosity of travellers. But those of Paris strike the stranger with astonishment!' 'Already in five and twenty years they figure among the most curious establishments of the capital:'-but the same high-flying panegyrist lets out the mortifying fact that already in five and twenty years, many of the best and costliest monuments are fallen to pieces, having, like so many other things in that country, been made for display, and not for duration. He observes that the architects appear to reserve their skill for erecting the habitations of the living, though those habitations are only intended for a time, and tombs are for a portion of eternity. Agreeing therefore with the grave-digger in Hamlet upon this point, he recommends that the police should interfere, and take care that those persons who expend large sums upon what he calls the luxury of tombs should not have the mortification of seeing the monuments which they had erected to pride or to grief, go to ruins in the course of a few years. Some other mortifying facts appear,—the bronze and the gilt copper with which the monuments are ornamented attract thieves; and great dogs therefore are kept to guard the burial-grounds. This would happen in the neighbourhood of London, or any great city: but it would hardly happen in the neighbourhood of London that we should have a Guide to the burial-grounds, as a fashionable promenade; that parties would be made to visit them; nor, though grief is proverbially dry, that taverns and drinking-houses should be established close beside them, for the accommodation not only of these parties of pleasure but of the mourners also! The very writer who says that a sensibilité douce et touchante was always the distinguishing

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characteristic of the French draws this true and frightful picture of their insensibility.

"Eh bien! nous avons vu beaucoup de ces enterremens, et nous avons remarqué avec surprise, avec indignation, que les personnes qui y assistaient s'y rendaient presque toutes comme à une partie de plaisir. Nous avons même appris, que la coûtume était pour tous ces parens, ces prétendus amis du défunt de se rendre à la fin de la cérémonie funèbre, dans ces guinguettes, et la de célébrer à table, et dans un repas souvent commandé d'avance, les vertus et les qualités de la personne enterrée. Nous l'avouerons, nous ne connaissons rien d'ausși scandaleux que cette absurde coûtume, rien qui démontre mieux à nos yeux l'excès d'immoralité dans lequel est tombé le peuple Parisien, depuis notre fatale révolution. C'est surtout le dimanche que les habitans de la capitale se rendent aux différens cimetières qui l'entourent. Ils y vont comme à la promenade, et il n'est pas rare de lire et la joie et le contentement sur la figure de ceux qui les visitent?'

There is however one day in the year when, we are assured, the Parisians are led to those burial-places by genuine piety,—it is on All Souls' day, which is set apart in the Romish church for the commemoration of the dead, and whole families visit the graves of their relations. Women in mourning repeat the prayers for the dead over the grave, and men are seen prostrate on the ground. The Spaniards have a custom upon that day almost as loathsome as the feast of the dead among the North American savages,they open the sepulchres in the churches and light them up! This is in the spirit of those Dominicans and Franciscans, who, in various parts of Europe, used to exhibit the dry bodies of their brethren ranged round the walls, and to line chapels with human skulls and thigh bones, abominable spectacles! which tend to make men regard the end of this mortal life with horror, rather than with religious hope. With them the grave is the door of purgatory, the most profitable fiction that was ever invented by priestcraft. One of our own poets (Donne) regards it with a finer and truer feeling, when he says:

'Church-yards are our cities, unto which
The most repair that are in goodness rich;
There is the best concourse and confluence ;
There are the holy suburbs, and from thence
Begins God's City, new Jerusalem,
Which doth extend her utmost gates to them.
At that gate then, triumphant soul, dost thou
Begin thy triumph!'

It appears that the bills of mortality at Paris hold out a tremendous lesson of morals to the Parisians, if, as may be fairly inferred, they agree in their results with the tombstones of the different cemeteries. In the burial-ground of Montmartre, which is the deposit for the gay part of Paris, the purlieus of the Palais Royal, the Rues St.

Honoré,

Honoré, Vivienne, Richelieu, and Montmartre, the Boulevards, and the Chaussée d'Antin, nine tombs in ten are to the memory of persons cut off in the flower of their youth. But in the burialground of Père la Chaise, which serves principally for the sober citizens of Paris, the inhabitants of the Marais, and of the Faubourg St. Antoine, nine out of ten record persons who had attained a good old age. In both cases this fact relates to subjects in easy or affluent circumstances, and the difference of mortality is solely attributable to the difference between a dissipated and a regular life. If nosological tables had been kept in different places, and in different parts of the world, with the same care as meteorological ones, how many more important results might have been deduced from them! It is said that insanity is seldom known in Spain, and rarely or never among private soldiers or sailors. The latter fact is easily explicable; military and naval discipline acts upon those who might be disposed to madness, like the perpetual presence of a keeper. To explain the infrequency of this dreadful malady in Spain would require a more intimate knowledge of the people than a stranger can possibly obtain. Something however may be ascribed to general temperance, and to the little use which is made of ardent spirits; and it should be remembered that convents often supply the places of madhouses, and that downright lunacy passes for high devotion and miraculous grace.

The monuments in the new Parisian cemeteries are generally in good taste, better than is usually found in England. The inscriptions are sufficiently French in sentiment. Two in this little volume are worthy of notice for a different cause. One is upon a person who was the most famous réstaurateur in Paris in his day, and it is said upon his tomb-stone that his whole life was consecrated to the useful arts. The other is upon one of Buonaparte's Generals, who is made to say

Dans toute ma vie

Je n'ai fait tort à personne.

One of these burial-grounds is planted with fruit trees, which is objected to as rendering the general effect moins attristante. We are told that a former possessor of Ermenonville planted dead trees in his gardens, pour inspirer la philosophie. But the oddest display of this kind was exhibited by a certain M. de Brunoi, who put his park in mourning for the death of his mother, and had barrels of ink sent from Paris that the jets d'eau might be in mourning also. Count Schimmelmann's monument for his wife was all that was wanting to make the scene complete: that nobleman placed the monument upon a spring, and made the water spout from an eye, that it might be a symbol of his excessive grief. It may still

be

be seen not far from Copenhagen, where it is known by the name of the Weeping Eye.'

The Parisians have committed no follies of this kind; but they have acted like themselves in making shew-catacombs and cimetières ornés. A becoming respect to human nature was manifested in removing the remains of the dead with decency, and preparing a receptacle for them; but it would have been better to put them out of sight and wall them up in the quarries, than to arrange them in patterns along the wall-skulls and thigh bones, like muskets and pistols in the small armoury at the Tower. Such exhibitions cannot have a salutary tendency; they foster that disease of mind in which melancholy madness has its foundation; they harden brutal natures, and are more likely to provoke the licentious to impious bravadoes than to reclaim them. Exposures of this kind originated in the spirit of monachism. They are unfeeling and unnatural. Public feeling would not tolerate them in Protestant countries. Earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

Burial grounds à la pittoresque, laid out for a promenade, are not more consonant to good feeling. This invention is indeed original in the people of Paris, for whom the author of the Promenade claims it with so much satisfaction; but he knows little of the customs of other countries, or he would not have said that a few crosses or tomb-stones are all that is to be seen in other places of interment. The beauty of the Mohammedan burial-grounds has been noticed by all travellers. The Afghauns call their cemeteries the Cities of the Silent; and hang garlands on the tombs and burn incense before them, because they believe that the ghosts of the departed dwell there, and sit each at the end of his own grave, enjoying the fragrance of these offerings. The churchyards in the Reductions in Paraguay were so many gardens. The graves were regularly arranged and bordered with the sweetest plants and flowers, and the walks were planted with orange-trees and palms. The Moravians in their missions observe the same regularity and decency the name which they give to a burial-place is God's ground.' In many parts of Wales the graves are carefully planted with flowers; and the beauty of this custom is felt by all English travellers. In Gibson's additions to Camden it is noticed, that the custom of planting rose trees upon the graves, anciently used both among the Greeks and Romans, had been observed time out of mind at Okeley, in Surry, especially by the young men and women who have lost their lovers, so that the churchyard was full of them. The graves are planted with flowers in some of the Catholic cantons in Switzerland, and receptacles of water are placed beside, with bunches of hyssop, for sprinkling them; the

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sprinkling,

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