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 Proposals 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 unaptly characterize the profession to which Mr. Middleton has the honor to belong.  The writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining character of Sable, in Steele’s excellent comedy of The Funeral.

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 honor 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 that he should 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 exuviae.  He concerns not himself even about the body, as it is a structure of parts internal, and a wonderful microcosm.  He leaves such curious