dead neighbors.  It has taught parties resident in large cities that the very air they live in reeks with human remains, which steam up from graves; and which, of course, they are continually breathing.  So it makes our churchyards to be worse haunted than they were formerly believed to be by ghosts, and, I may add, vampyres, in consequence of the dead continually rising from them in this unpleasant manner.  Indeed, Science is likely to make people dread them a great deal more than Superstition ever did, by showing that their effluvia breed typhus and cholera; so that they are really and truly very dangerous.  I should not be surprised to hear some sanitary lecturer say, that the fear of churchyards was a sort of instinct implanted in the mind, to prevent ignorant people and children from going near such unwholesome places.

It would be comparatively well if the mischief done us by Science, Medicine and Chemistry, and all that sort of thing—­stopped here.  The mere consideration that burial in the heart of cities is unhealthy, would but lead to extramural interment, to which our only objection—­though even that is no very trifling one—­is that it would diminish mortality, and consequently our trade.  But this Science—­confound it!—­shows that the dead do not remain permanently in their coffins, even when the sextons of metropolitan graveyards will let them.  It not only informs Londoners that they breathe and drink the deceased; but it reveals how the whole of the defunct party is got rid of, and turned into gases, liquids, and mould.  It exposes the way in which all animal matter as it is called in chemical books—­is dissolved, evaporates, and disappears; and is ultimately, as I may say, eaten up by Nature, and goes to form parts of plants, and of other living creatures.  So that, if gentlemen really wanted to be interred with the remains of their ancestors, it would sometimes be possible to comply with their wishes only by burying them with a quantity of mutton—­not to say with the residue of another quadruped than the sheep, which often grazes in churchyards.  Science, in short, is hammering into people’s heads truths which they have been accustomed merely to gabble with their mouths—­that all flesh is indeed grass, or convertible into it; and not only that the human frame does positively turn to dust, but into a great many things besides.  Now, I say, that when they become really and truly convinced of all this; when they know and reflect that the body cannot remain any long time in the grave which it is placed in; I am sadly afraid that they will think twice before they will spend from thirty to several hundred pounds in merely putting a corpse into the ground to decompose.