I could here pause with pleasure, and invite the Reader to indulge with me in contemplation of the advantages which must have attended such a practice.  We might ruminate upon the beauty which the monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the surrounding images of nature—­from the trees, the wild flowers, from a stream running perhaps within sight or hearing, from the beaten road stretching its weary length hard by.  Many tender similitudes must these objects have presented to the mind of the traveller leaning upon one of the tombs, or reposing in the coolness of its shade, whether he had halted from weariness or in compliance with the invitation, ‘Pause, Traveller!’ so often found upon the monuments.  And to its epitaph also must have been supplied strong appeals to visible appearances or immediate impressions, lively and affecting analogies of life as a journey—­death as a sleep overcoming the tired wayfarer—­of misfortune as a storm that falls suddenly upon him—­of beauty as a flower that passeth away, or of innocent pleasure as one that may be gathered—­of virtue that standeth firm as a rock against the beating waves;—­of hope ’undermined insensibly like the poplar by the side of the river that has fed it,’ or blasted in a moment like a pine-tree by the stroke of lightning upon the mountain-top—­of admonitions and heart-stirring remembrances, like a refreshing breeze that comes without warning, or the taste of the waters of an unexpected fountain.  These, and similar suggestions, must have given, formerly, to the language of the senseless stone a voice enforced and endeared by the benignity of that Nature with which it was in unison.—­We, in modern times, have lost much of these advantages; and they are but in a small degree counterbalanced to the inhabitants of large towns and cities, by the custom of depositing the dead within, or contiguous to, their places of worship; however splendid or imposing may be the appearance of those edifices, or however interesting or salutary the recollections associated with them.  Even were it not true that tombs lose their monitory virtue when thus obtruded upon the notice of men occupied with the cares of the world, and too often sullied and defiled by those cares, yet still, when death is in our thoughts, nothing can make amends for the want of the soothing influences of Nature, and for the absence of those types of renovation and decay, which the fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and contemplative mind.  To feel the force of this sentiment, let a man only compare in imagination the unsightly manner in which our monuments are crowded together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless church-yard of a large town, with the still seclusion of a Turkish cemetery, in some remote place; and yet further sanctified by the grove of cypress in which it is embosomed.  Thoughts in the same temper as these have already been expressed with true sensibility by an ingenuous Poet of the present day.  The subject of his poem is ‘All Saints Church, Derby:’  he has been deploring the forbidding and unseemly appearance of its burial-ground, and uttering a wish, that in past times the practice had been adopted of interring the inhabitants of large towns in the country.—­