Does putting on garments of a certain colour constitute true mourning?  Is it not the heart and the affections that mourn, rather than the outside raiment?  Bingham, in speaking of the primitive Christians, says that “they did not condemn the notion of going into a mourning habit for the dead, nor yet much approve of it, but left it to all men’s liberty as an indifferent thing, rather commending those that either omitted it wholly, or in short laid it aside again, as acting more according to the bravery and philosophy of a Christian.”

John Wesley directed, in his will, that six poor men should have twenty shillings each for carrying his body to the grave,—­“For,” said he, “I particularly desire that there may be no hearse, no coach, no escutcheon, no pomp, except the tears of those that loved me, and are following me to Abraham’s bosom.  I solemnly adjure my executors, in the name of God, punctually to observe this.”

It will be very difficult to alter the mourning customs of our time.  We may anxiously desire to do so, but the usual question will occur—­“What will people say?” “What will the world say?” We involuntarily shrink back, and play the coward like our neighbours.  Still, common sense, repeatedly expressed, will have its influence; and, in course of time, it cannot fail to modify the fashions of society The last act of Queen Adelaide, by which she dispensed with the hired mummery of undertakers’ grief,—­and the equally characteristic request of Sir Robert Peel on his deathbed, that no ceremony, nor pomp, should attend his last obsequies,—­cannot fail to have their due effect upon the fashionable world; and through them, the middle classes, who are so disposed to imitate them in all things, will in course of time benefit by their example.  There is also, we believe, a growing disposition on the part of the people at large to avoid the unmeaning displays we refer to; and it only needs the repeated and decided expression of public opinion, to secure a large measure of beneficial reform in this direction.

Societies have already been established in the United States, the members of which undertake to disuse mourning themselves, and to discountenance the use of it by others.  It is only, perhaps, by association and the power of numbers that this reform is to be accomplished; for individuals here and there could scarcely be expected to make way against the deeply-rooted prejudices of the community at large.

CHAPTER XIII.

GREAT DEBTORS.

“What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?  You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who never understood arithmetic.”—­Sydney Smith.

“Quand on doit et qu’on ne paye pas, c’est comme si on ne devait pas.”—­Araene Houssaye.

“Of what a hideous progeny is debt the father!  What lies, what meanness, what invasions on self-respect, what cares, what double-dealing!  How in due season it will carve the frank, open face into wrinkles:  how like a knife, it will stab the houeat heart.”—­Douglas Jerrold.