upon two-thirds of the tombstones here, to decent English prose, which one would suppose might have been produced at a much less expenditure of intellectual effort?  But since it is an unquestionable fact that we are thus totally depraved in taste and feeling, why don’t some of our bards, to whom the Muse has not been propitious in other departments of metrical composition, and who, to be blunt, are good for nothing else, such as ——­, or ——­, and many others you know, come out here among the marble-cutters and open an epitaph-shop?  Mournful stanzas might then be procured of every size and pattern, composed with decent reverence for the rules of grammar, respect for the feet and limbs of the linear members, and possibly some regard for consistency in the ideas they might chance occasionally to express.  Genin the hatter, and Cockroach Lyon, each keeps a poet.  Why cannot the marble-cutters procure some of the Heliconian fraternity as partners?  Bards would thus serve the cause of education, benefit future antiquaries, and earn more hard dimes ten times over than they do in writing lines for the blank corners of newspapers and the waste spaces between articles in magazines.  I throw this hint out of the window of the “Atlantic,” in the fervent hope that it will be seen, picked up, and pocketed by some reformer who is now out of business; and I would earnestly urge such individual to agitate the question with all his might, and wake up the community to the vital importance, by making use of “poetic fire” and “inspired frenzy” now going to waste, or some other instrumentality, of a reformation in epitaphic necrology.

Seriously, modern epitaphs are a burlesque upon religion, a caricature of all things holy, divine, and beautiful, and an outrage upon the common sense and culture of the community.  A collection of comic churchyard poetry might be made in this place which would eclipse the productions of Mr. K.N.  Pepper, and cause a greater “army of readers to explode” than his “Noad to a Whealbarrer” or the “Grek Slaiv” has done.

* * * * *

During our rambles among the tombstones the sun has long since passed the meridian, and the streets and avenues of the cemetery are crowded with carriages and thronged with pedestrians, the tramping of horses’ feet, the rumbling of wheels, and the voices of men fill the air, and the place which was so silent and deserted this morning is now as noisy and bustling as the metropolis yonder.  And soon begin to arrive thick and fast the funeral trains.  Many of the black-plumed hearses are followed by only a single hired coach or omnibus, others by long trails of splendid equipages.  Upon the broad slope of a hill, whither the greater number of the processions move, entirely destitute of trees and flooded with sunshine, many thousand graves, mostly unmarked by headstones, lie close together, resembling in appearance a corn-field which has been permitted to run to grass unploughed.