From one elevated point in this cemetery one can count more than a hundred urns, getting at last weary and confused with the receding multitude.  The urn is not dissimilar to the domestic mantel ornament, and always a stony piece of textile fabric is feigned to be thrown over its shoulder.  At times it is wreathed in stony flowers.  The only variety is in the form.  Sometimes your urn is broad and squat, a Silenus among urns; sometimes fragile and high-shouldered, like a slender old maid; here an “out-size” in urns stalwart and strong, and there a dwarf peeping quaintly from its wrapping.  The obelisks, too, run through a long scale of size and refinement.  But the curious man finds no hidden connection between the carriage of the monument and the character of the dead.  Messrs. Slap & Dash apparently take the urn or obelisk that comes readiest to hand.  One wonders dimly why mourners have this overwhelming proclivity for Messrs. Slap & Dash and their obelisk and urn.

The reason why the firm produces these articles may be guessed at.  They are probably easy to make, and require scarcely any skill.  The contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy shed in a back street, where a human being passes dismally through life the while he chips out an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his employers’ retailing.  But the question why numberless people will profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem.  For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk.  The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting monument that no repetition can stale.

The artistic cowardice of the English is perhaps the clue to the mystery.  Your Englishman is always afraid to commit himself to criticism without the refuge of a tu quoque.  He is covered dead, just as he is covered living, with the “correct thing.”  A respectable stock-in-trade is proffered him by the insinuating shopman, to whom it is our custom to go.  He is told this is selling well, or that is much admired.  Heaven defend that he should admire on his own account!  He orders the stock urn or the stock slab because it is large and sufficiently expensive for his means and sorrow, and because he knows of nothing better.  So we mourn as the stonemason decrees, or after the example and pattern of the Smiths next door.  But some day it will dawn upon us that a little thought and a search after beauty are far more becoming than an order and a cheque to the nearest advertising tradesman.  Or it may be we shall conclude that the anonymous peace of a grassy mould is better than his commercial brutalities, and so there will be an end of him.