In the case of a clergyman, a taste for keeping his churchyard in becoming order is just like a taste for keeping his garden and shrubbery in order:  only let him begin the work, and the taste will grow.  There is latent in the mind of every man, unless he be the most untidy and unobservant of the species, a love for well-mown grass and for sharply outlined gravel-walks.  My brethren, credite experto.  I did not know that in my soul there was a chord that vibrated responsive to trim gravel and grass, till I tried, and lo! it was there.  Try for yourselves:  you do not know, perhaps, the strange affinities that exist between material and immaterial nature.  If any youthful clergyman shall read these lines, who knows in his conscience that his churchyard-walks are grown up with weeds, and the graves covered with nettles, upon sight hereof let him summon his man-servant, or get a labourer if he have no man-servant.  Let him provide a reaping-hook and a large new spade.  These implements will suffice in the meantime.  Proceed to the churchyard:  do not get disheartened at its neglected look, and turn away.  Begin at the entrance-gate.  Let all the nettles and long grass for six feet on. either side of the path be carefully cut down and gathered into heaps.  Then mark out with a line the boundaries of the first ten yards of the walk.  Fall to work and cut the edges with the spade; clear away the weeds and grass that have overspread the walk, also with the spade.  In a little time you will feel the fascination of the sharp outline of the walk against the grass on each side.  And I repeat, that to the average human being there is something inexpressibly pleasing in that sharp outline.  By the time the ten yards of walk are cut, you will find that you have discovered a new pleasure and a new sensation; and from that day will date a love of tidy walks and grass;—­and what more is needed to make a pretty churchyard?  The fuchsias, geraniums, and so forth, are of the nature of luxuries, and they will follow in due time:  but grass and gravel are the foundation of rustic neatness and tidiness.

As for the treatise on Burning the Dead, it is interesting and eloquent, though I am well convinced that its author has been putting forih labour in vain.  I remember the consternation with which I read the advertisements announcing its publication.  I made sure that it must be the production of one of those wrong-headed individuals who are always proposing preposterous things, without end or meaning.  Why on earth should we take to burning the dead?  What is to be gained by recurring to a heathen rite, repudiated by the early Christians, who, as Sir Thomas Browne tells us, ’stickt not to give their bodies to be burnt in their lives, but detested that mode after death?’ And wherefore do anything so horrible, and so suggestive of cruelty and sacrilege, as to consign to devouring flames even the unconscious remains of a departed friend?  But after reading the essay, I feel that the author