One may go from end to end of this cemetery and find scarcely anything beautiful, appropriate, or tender.  A lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ.  In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen.  Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing.  It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely restful against the serried vulgarity around it.

But the tradesman ghoul will not leave us; he follows us up and down, indecently clamouring his name and address, and at last turns our meditation to despair.  Certain stock devices become as painful as popular autotypes.  There is the lily broken on its stalk; we meet it here on a cross and there on an obelisk, presently on the pedestal of an urn.  There is the hand pointing upward, here balanced on the top of an obelisk and there upon a cross.  The white-robed angel, free from the remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again.  “All this is mine,” says the tradesman ghoul.  “Behold the names of me—­Slap & Dash here, the Ugliness Company there, and this the work of the Cheap and Elegant Funeral Association.  This is where we slew the art of sculpture.  These are our trophies that sculpture is no more.  All this marble might have been beautiful, all this sorrow might have been expressive, had it not been for us.  See, this is our border, No.  A 5, and our pedestal No.  E, and our second quality urn, along of a nice appropriate text—­a pretty combination and a cheap one.  Or we can do it you better in border A 3, and pedestal C, and a larger urn or a hangel——­”

The meditative man is seized with a dismal horror, and retreats to the gates.  Even there a wooden advertisement grins broadly at him in his discomfiture, and shouts a name athwart his route.  And so down the winding road to the valley, and then up Parliament Hill towards Hampstead and its breeze-whipped ponds.  And the mind of him is full of a dim vision of days that have been, when sculptor and stonemason were one, when the artist put his work in the porch for all the world to see, when people had leisure to think how things should be done and heart to do them well, when there was beauty in the business of life and dignity in death.  And he wonders rather hopelessly if people will ever rise up against these damnable tradesmen who ruin our arts, make our lives costly and dismal, and advertise, advertise even on our graves.

HOW I DIED