restoration? In what state are the altar and its screen, and the font? In many of our churches the altar-screens have either perished, or the original work is hidden or defaced, as we have seen, by clumsy wood-work, or by paintings, "where sprawl the saints" of artists less skilful than “ Verrio or Laguerre ;"-let such be carefully restored. In others of our churches, the altars themselves and fonts will be found in a state of filth and decay disgraceful to us as members of Christ's Church, professing to hold in reverence the sacraments which He has or

dained, but wholly regardless of the places of

their celebration.'

We have wished to let Mr Markland speak for himself, because a good man's voice, whose acts are like his words, is never heard in vain. And without any effort at deep research, or philosophy, or eloquence-even where a writer prefers, like Mr. Markland to speak rather in the language of others than in his own-there is a secret charm in the very absence of pretension, which cannot but tell upon a well-constituted mind.

Our object is one, to which Mr. Markland himself would far rather that we should devote the little space which can be given to these observations than to any praise of himself. It is to carry on the good work which he has begun; and to urge the same suggestion, that our sepulchral monuments should be shaped hereafter to some more appropriate and religious purpose than the mere commemoration of a name by a mass of marble.

The time when this suggestion has been thrown out is peculiarly appropriate to it. The eyes of the country have been opened to a sense of its spiritual destitution. With this new sense (for new it is) has come a deep conviction upon all classes, not merely on those who view things religiously, but on the politician, the philosophical speculator, even on the worldly proprietor, to whom property is an idol, that unless some great efforts are made to place once more over our dense masses of population some more efficient teaching and guidance than the staff of a policeman, or even the bayonet of a regiment, society must be disorganized, and with this must come ruin to every interest, worldly or unworldly alike. We have learnt at last that this teaching and guidance must be one of the heart, and of the whole man; not merely of the head, administered by doses in newspapers, and at Mechanics' Institutes, but guaranteed and enforced with all the authority which can be given to human words by a divine commission, and by all good and holy appeals to human affections-appeals

which can be found nowhere perfect but in the declarations and ministrations of the gospel. To the Church, therefore, men are looking on each side to come forward and do for the country, what no statesman, or Parliament, can hope of themselves to do-to infuse into the effete limbs of the empire new life and vigour; to teach those to obey who are now disposed for anarchy; to fill those with love who are now hating; to give contentment to those who cannot be rich; and benevolence and charity to the rich, who, if they can be brought to devote to religious and charitable purposes only a portion of their wealth, may yet preserve the remainder.

καὶ τὸ μὲν πρὸ χρημάτων
κτησίων ἔκνος βαλὼν
σφενδόνας ἀπ ̓ εἰμέτρου,
οὐκ ἔδυ πρόπας δήμος,
πημονᾶς γέμων ἄγαν,

οὐδ ̓ ἐπόντισε σκαφος.-Agamemnon, v. 978.

And in looking round for the various resources which may be made available to this purpose, few present themselves as more obvious and more likely to be productive than the one suggested by Mr. Markland.

As a better and higher spirit revives among us, the questions must occur, especially in those moments when the heart is most softened, and the truth of things most vividly brought out by the presence of death-what is the nature of death itself; what the relations between the dead and the living; what the proper destination of sacred buildings; what language ought to be used in them; and with what eye those whom we commemorate would regard the honour which we pay them. We shall in the same proportion learn to think more of others than of ourselves; more of truth than of what the world will say on our own thriftiness or profusion; more, in one word, of heaven than of earth; and then, perhaps, we may be able to form a right conception and pure taste, as on an infinite variety of other subjects, so especially on sepulchral monuments.

Their history indeed is remarkable; and well deserves to be studied by a philosophical antiquarian, not merely to trace costumes, and define periods of architecture, but as a practical illustration of the changes which have followed each other in habits of thought and action, upon the most important questions, and under the most exciting circumstances of human life. It is a history of religion; and in the Christian period, a history of the Church;

an exhibition of prevailing thought and | cite, to the same effect, Origen, Eusebius, feeling, deliberately planned, contrived for Prudentius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, &c., &c. perpetuity, permitted under the sanction of Perhaps no form or place of sepulture the Church, and so intimately connected could be imagined harmonizing more comwith the saddest realities of life, that either pletely with true reason and the spirit of affectation and hypocrisy must be consid- the Gospel than those vast catacombs, ered excluded, or, if admitted, must betray stretching in every direction under the city a state of mind completely wedded to falsi- of Rome, on the illustration of which so ties. Mr. Markland has already enlarged much pains have been bestowed. Originhis original memoir to the Oxford Archi- ally excavated, it is probable, by the worktectural Society. He might find a very ex-ers of pozzolana, they offered a natural tensive and interesting field for still further refuge from persecution both for living researches, by prosecuting them in this Christians and for dead. Their long nardirection; and we will venture to offer a few questions and suggestions ourselves.

'Illud haud silentio prætereundum est,' says the author of Roma Subterranea, quod inviolabili consuetudine a Christianis receptum servatumque fuisse novimus, ut dum tumuli defunctorum corpora locarentur, si forte aliquando We quote from Gough-who goes on to plura eodem monumento cadavera reponi con

tingeret, haud unquam unum alteri superponere, reason to suppose, have been scattered tur, sed unumquodque ad latus adjacentis con- about by the hands of convicts. In 1552, sisteret.'-Lib. i., chap. 26.

And the rule was subsequently confirmed by ecclesiastical councils.

These expressions, however, of natural piety soon passed into a desire less rational, The efforts made to honour the dead, and to spare the survivors perhaps from the sight of the painful work of corruption, easily lapsed into an endeavour to prevent corruption altogether: an endeavour not only futile, but leading to much that is inconsistent with the true reverence due to the mortal remains of our brethren, and with a just view of Christian doctrine in regard to death.

the tomb of William the Conqueror was opened at Caen. In 1562, the Calvinists broke open that of his queen, Matilda, when, among other acts, the ring was stolen from her finger. Edward the Confessor's body was exposed in James II.'s reign; Canute's in 1766, in repairing Winchester cathedral; Sebert's, king of the East Angles, in Henry III.'s reign. In Charles II's reign, that of William Rufus. In 1770. Edward I.'s, in Westminster Abbey, in order to ascertain the meaning of the renewal of the cere' about his body, for which frequent orders were given. The remains of our Saxon kings, removed from their places of rest, lie in boxes on the side screens of the choir of Winchester cathedral, and not even these have been safe from prying eyes; but not many years since were allowed to be examined by Edmund Cartwright, Esq., of the York militia, to whom, with two other gentleWinchester gave permission to open any men of the regiment, the then Dean of tombs in the cathedral, provided it was done with privacy and decency, and under the direction of the mason of the chapter ! ! !' Edward IV., and Elizabeth Woodville, his wife; Catherine, wife of Henry V.; Queen Catherine Parr, at Sudeley, under circumstances most revolting and shocking; and King Charles I., within the last few years, have all been disturbed in their graves; not to speak of King John, in Worcester cathedral, of whom it is added‡

6

To these efforts to save the body from corruption we seem to owe the rise of our first sepulchral monuments It was natural in the first place to mark the place where they lay, that their remains might not be disturbed; and on a similar principle, those who could afford it, in a spirit far from thoroughly Christian, instead of permitting the bones to mingle in the natural course of decay,-earth with earth, ashes with ashes, dust with dust,'-would make ineffectual attempts to save them from the more loathsome circumstances of death, or at least to delay the approach of them. Hence the adoption of the stone coffin, which has been the germ of all our Christian sepulchral memorials; and perhaps the very fact that these coffins were acces sible only to the wealthier classes would in itself imply a defective principle. In the death which levels all, all should be equal; and artificial distinctions here, of 'One man stole a finger-bone, and sent it up whatever kind, founded on mere wealth, to London to be tipped with silver, and refused can scarcely be consistent with truth or a large sum for it; but afterwards lost it on the reason. That there is something errone- road. Mr. Thompson of Worcester-the name ous in this vain contest against the laws of ought to be perpetuated-took some of the maguniversal decay, in this struggle to main-gots to bait his angling-rod; but it was three tain a property in our crumbling frame, even when all has departed that made its possession and command valuable, may be inferred even from the practical difficulties connected with it, which have been so

elaborately discussed in Lord Stowell's judgment on the subject of iron coffins.

days before a fish would bite, and when he drew out a dace he carried it in triumph through the streets.'

Our ancestors, under the influence of tianity, did, indeed, at times lay open the a corrupted and corrupting form of Chrisremains of those whom they accounted And its futility must be impressed strong-saints; but it was with reverence, to honly on the minds of those who turn over the our and enshrine them more nobly than pages of the Archæologia,' and other an- before; not to carry off a bone to lie in a tiquarian works, when they read of the dis- cabinet of curiosities, or a lock of hair, as turbed graves, and the prying, inhuman, we have seen ourselves, from King Charles unchristian curiosity, which, under the I., to be handed about in a lady's drawingpretence of science or of historical accuracy, has violated so often the last receptacles of the dead. Alfred's bones, deposited in Hyde Abbey, there is every

See Archæologia, vol. xiii., p. 310.
+ See Gough, vol. ii., p. 337.
+ See Green's History of Worcester.

room; or to taste the liquor of embalmment, or to pry into some singularity of dress or usage to be recorded at the next meeting of the Antiquarian Society-without a thought of the curses which the wise and good of all ages have denounced on the violators of graves.

But to return. Abroad, to the present day, coffins are rarely used. The lower classes of society even in this country,' says Cotman, following Gough,* up to the time of Elizabeth, had no other coffin than the winding-sheet.' In many old country churches might lately be seen a wooden box, ridged, with one or two lids, which was used as a bier to inclose and carry out the poor dead; and though such a seeming disrespect would be most painful in the present day, if it were confined to the poor, it may be questioned whether the simple depositing of the body in consecrated ground, with proper security against its being disturbed, but without unnatural attempts to prevent it mingling with its native earth, may not be the most proper form of sepulture:

The Barons of Roslin,' says Father Hay, were buried of old in their armour, without any coffin, and the late Roslin, my goodfather [or father-in-law], grandfather to the present Roslin, was the first buried in a coffin, against the sentiments of King James VII., then in Scotland, and several other persons well versed in antiquity, to whom my mother Jean Spoteswood, grandmother of Archbishop Spoteswood, would not hearken, thinking it beggarly to be buried in that manner. The great expense she was at in burying her husband occasioned the sumptuary acts which were made in the follow ing parliament.'-Grose's Scotland, p. 47. (See also Lay of Last Minstrel, vi. 23, and Note.)

And Sir John Moore did not repose less honourably, because

much more is necessary than the mere inclosure of the body in wood; and the whole question is altered.

With the prevalence of this Egyptian contest against decay, we may trace the rise also of the superstitious legends respecting the remains of the martyrs. For a body to be found undecayed was in itself assumed as a sufficient evidence of sanctity; and we little know how many of the worst features of Popery in the worship of relics and the multiplication of false miracles, and the adoration of saints, may be traced to the unreasonable indulgence of that human weakness which shrinks from becoming a prey to the worm, and from thus paying the last debt of its sinful mortality.

If there is anything sound in these views, the first corruption in our church sepulchral monuments must be looked for in the use of stone coffins. They were first formed of different blocks. Subsequently they were hollowed out of a single stone; sometimes with a circular cavity for the head; and sunk but slightly beneath the surface of the ground. It was a natural accompaniment to set upon the lid some mark to describe who lay beneath, in a rude inscription or carving but little relieved.

'Effigies,' says Mr. Stothard,* are rarely to be met with in England before the middle of the thirteenth century; a circumstance not to be attributed to the causes generally assigned, which were either that they had been destroyed, or that the unsettled state of the times did not offer sufficient encouragement for erecting such memorials; but it rather appears not to have been before become the practice to represent the deceased. If it had been otherwise, for what reason do we not find effigies over the tombs of William the Conqueror, his son William Rufus, or his daughter Gundrada, (nor, it may be added, of his wife, Matilda, or his daughter Cecilia, at Caen)? Yet, after a time, it is an undoubted fact that the alteration introduced by the Normans was the addition of the figure of the person deceased; and then it appeared not in the bold style of the later Norman monuments, but partaking of the character and low It is assumed, of course, that no fright-relief of those tombs it was about to supersede. ful accumulations of interment would be crowded into a narrow space, such as are now found in our metropolitan cemeteries -and that no burials would take place in churches, or under circumstances which may render it necessary to guard against infection and disease.t In these cases

'No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Nor in sheet nor in shroud they bound him, But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him.'

Of these, and of the few perhaps that were executed, Roger, Bishop of Sarum, is the only specimen in good preservation.

About the beginning of the fourteenth century the coffin-shape entirely disappears, and the effigy is represented in full relief."

In this individualizing tendency, perhaps, we may find the source of the second great corruption of our tombs. Christianity cannot regard death except as the Church re

• Monumental Remains, p. 4.

gards it; and the Church cannot regard the individual dead beyond what was legithe dead any more than the living, as in- timate in the exercise of private affection, dividuals, unless they are especially marked soon led to a third great corruption. The out for honour by holding some divine stone coffin, from being sunk in the ground, commission, or by possessing some worthy rose up above the surface, sometimes plain, spiritual claim to be singled out for com- sometimes with the lid more or less elabomemoration. The whole body, not any rately sculptured, and sometimes with a separate limb, should be the object of the ridge, or dos d'âne, probably to throw off Christian contemplation. Everything which the moisture to preserve it from decay; confers a solemn and venerable character and simultaneous with this movement the on the general Christian cemetery or place historian of religion will trace the rise of of rest (kopio), as the last common home that worship of relics, and worship of the and receptacle of all our perishable bodies, dead, and belief in the miracles worked at where the small and the great lie together, particular tombs, which amounted in the and the servant is free from his master,' is end almost to a belief in sorcery. Instead consistent with the spirit of the Gospel, and of fixing the attention on the real spot in therefore with truth, and therefore with the consecrated building, where daily good taste. But it may be doubted whether the still retaining our individual distinctions beyond the house of death, except in some rare instances, is not akin to the same false and dangerous tendency, which in the gradual growth of Popery drew minds from contemplating the whole body of the Church to particular teachers and founders of sects; and from the whole body of the elect departed to the meditation of particular saints. Place an Englishman on the field of Waterloo by one of those spots where he knows that hundreds of his countrymen are buried, who died fighting for their country; and his thoughts will be fixed on a grand social spectacle, elevating and refining them by its abstraction from all selfish tendencies. Let a thousand widows and orphans stand there mourning over the separate graves, each of their own kinsman; and domestic feelings and affections may indeed be roused, but the greater lesson of patriotism will be lost and forgotten. There is, then, no longer to be read in death the great maxim of social life on which the wisest politicians have known that the safety of their countries depended-a maxim as true and as necessary in the Church as in the State-that the individual is far more concerned in the welfare of society than society in the wel fare of the individual :—xades piv yip pepóμevos ἀνὴρ τὸ καθ ̓ ἑαυτὸν διαφθειρομένης τῆς πατρίδος οὐδὲν ἧσσον ξυναπολλυται, κακατυχῶν δὲ ἐν εὐτυχούσῃ πολλῷ μᾶλλον διασωζεται. * And thus individual memorials over graves, except under particular circumstances, where they have rendered great services to society, and as Christians to the society of Christians, the Church, may properly be avoided.

One false principle admitted, others will soon follow; and the principle of retaining before the eyes of the living the memory of Thucyd. lib. ii. c. 60.

spiritual miracles and spiritual cures were to be sought, the busy, sensualized, morbid curiosity for forbidden converse with the dead, which, mixed with fear and superstition, is so common to human nature, was taken advantage of to draw the vulgar mind from the altar to the tomb. The shrine of the supposed saint or martyr was venerated and loaded with gifts, while the table of the Lord was neglected; and the very first principle of Christian piety towards the dead was violated by disturbing the holiest remains, exposing them to sight in all their decay, and even trafficking with them for money. To bury our dead out of our sight' is a great law of true religious feeling. Nature, which has made death a loathsome and a fearful sight, and even natural love which would not willingly behold the corruption of that which we venerate, would throw a veil over the last sad process of mortal decay; and anything which obtrudes it too closely upon our senses must be bad. If this is true, the raised tombs in which the bodies were deposited above the surface* of the ground are a solecism in propriety. They became a greater solecism, when, by the operation of the spirit above alluded to, and by the natural tendency of the fancy to substitute a sensible magical operation for natural causes, or for secret spiritual influence, the tomb became a centre for devotion and a

The examination of several royal tombs has shown that this was originally their destination; body to be interred and buried in the choir of our and so late as the will of Henry VIII:-'Our college at Westminster; and there to be made and set, as soon as conveniently may be done after our decease, by our executors, at our costs and charges, tomb for our bones to rest in, with a fair grate about if it be not done by us in our lifetime, an honourable it, in which we will that the bones and body of our Queen Jane be put also.'-Fuller's Church History, b. v., p. 244.