Litchfield enquirer., 1876-12-28

derer abroad. The houses m which they were born, the tombs ip Nhich they lie, the localities they made 1anaons by their good or evil deeds, and lzl6 works their genius left behind them ma necessarily the chief shrines of his pil gz1rnage. You. leave London with Gistinoter memory of | he monuments in Westminster Abbey and St. Panl's than of the turbulent streams of life that surge through the Strand. Mr. Blank, to whom you bore 2 letter of introduction, is not so real per- | you saw at St. GiIes's, Cripplegate, or De Foe, who sleeps in the- melancholy Bun- | hill Fields Burial Ground, ,-the scene of '.the great pit in Finsbury, 7 in his history of the London plague. You catch your self assisting. with strange relish. at the | burning of heretics at Smithfield. Ridley and Latimer stand before you in flesh and. bone and flame at Oxford. Thomas a Beckett falls stabbed at your feet on the stone Tagging in Canterbury Cathedral. At HOlyrood. are not DarnleY and pallid Rnthven, in his steel corseleb, forever creeping up that narr0w spfrnf staircase leading to the small cabinet where Rizzio l is supping with the queen? You cannot I escape these things if you would. Your I railway carriage takes you up at one fa- ! nous grave and sets you down at another. In Paris, where the very atmosphere thrills with intense life, you are brought at each step face to face with the dead What people are these that fit in groups | up and down the brilliant boulevards :? They are not slipping absinthe and taking
 their ease,-the poor ghosts, old and new! l Can you stand in the Place de la Concoide
 and not think of the twenty eight hum l dred persons who were guillotined there
 between 1793 and 1795? A few minutes ! walk from the crowded cafes leads you to l the morgue, ''the little Doric morgue," as ! Browning calls it The gilded dome of
 the Invalides keeps perpetually in your
 mind ''the terror of Europe" held down by sixty tons of porphyry, in the rotunda, -the grandest tomb in the world. The 1 neatly-swept asphalt under your feet ran blood but yesterday. Here it was, near.
 the Tuileries, the insurgents had g. barri- serve on the facade of yonder building,
 into the sacrilegious shot holes. On the
 verge of the city, and within sound of it's feverish heart. throb. stretch Pere la i Chaise, and Montmartre, and Mont Par
 nasse, pathetic with renowned names.
 suppose that taste for church-yards and cemeteries IS cultivated taste. At
 home they were entirely disconnected in my mind with any thought of enjoyment; l but after month on the other side pre- ferred metropolitan graveyard to almost l any object of interest that could be pre- sented to me. A cemetery at home sug-
 gests awkward possibilities; but nothing of the kind occurs to you in muling through a foreign battle-ground. You wander along the serpentine walk as you would stroll through a picture gallery. You as little think of adding mound to the one as you would of contributing a painting to the other. You survey the
 monoliths and the bas-rrliefs and the urns
 and the miniature Athenian temples from
 the standpoint of an unbiased spectator
 who has paid his admittance fee and ex-
 poets entertainment or instruction. Some
 of the pleasantest hours l paused in sight
 seeing were spent in graveyards. The
 Jewish cemetery at Prague, with its smo-
 ky Gothic synagogue of the thirteenth
 century (the Attssesseeh,ske9, and the an.
 cient church-yard of St. John at Nurem-
 berg. where the remains of Albert Durer
 once rested, and where Hans Sachs and
 many another worthy of his day still rest,
 were among the most notable things we
 saw. The engraved brass plates-the P
 P c. cards, so to speak, of the departed
 aristocracy of Nuremberg-on the hori-
 zontal slabs of St. Johns are very quaint,
 with their crests. and coats-of arms, and
 symbols of gentility. At Prague the stones are marked with pitchers and
 hands. to designate the descendants of
 the tribes of Levi and Aaron. They claim
 to have one stone that dates as far back
 as A. D. 606 Some of the graves are held
 in great veneration; that of Rabbi Abig-
 nor Kara, who died in 1439, is often made
 the point of pilgrimage by Jews living in
 distant lands. Within the yard is bnil-
 ding where the grave clothes are kept for all corners. The dead millionaire and the
 dead pauper are arrayed in the same hum-
 ble garb, and alike given to earth Tn a
 rough board coffin. The Jewish custom,
 like death itself, is no respecter of per-
 sons. There is fine austerity in this.
 It was always a vague satisfaction to
 observe that the mortuary sculptures of
 the Old World were every whit as hid
 eous as our own. The sepulchral designs
 in churches abroad are generally in the
 worst style of Middle Age realism.
 half -draped skeleton of Death, plunging
 his dart into the bosom of some emacia-
 ted marble girl, seems to have been a con-
 soling symbol to the survivors few cen-
 tures ago. This ghastly fancy Is. con-
 stantly under your eyes. If call it
 ghastly give expression to the effect it
 produced on me at first. It would not
 be honest for me to affirm that did not
 like 1t at last. l became so accustomed
 to this skeleton and his brother mon-
 strosities that when we visited those
 three grim chambers under the Church of
 the Capuchins at Rome, and saw the
 carefully polished skulls of hundreds of
 monks wrought into pillars and arches
 and set upon shelves, l looked at them as
 complacently as if they had been a lot of
 exploded percussion caps. ''It IS pity
 they can't be used again. thought; and
 that was all. began to believe the
 beautiful economy of nature 10 be great
 ly overrated. a..
 This is the bnrial place of the Cap
 puccini, who esteem 1t blissful privi-
 lege to lie here for a few years in conse-
 crated earth brought from Jerusalem, and
 then, when their graves are wanted for
 fresher brothers, to be taken up and
 transformed into architectural decora- tions. The walls and recesses and arched
 ceilings of these chapels (which are be-
 heath the church but not under ground)
 are thus ornamented with the brother
 hood skillfully arranged in fanciful devil
 ces, the fnger-jolnt and the fragile links
 of the veftebral column being wrought in
 to friezes and light cornices, and the lar
 ger bones arranged in diamonds and
 hearts and rounds, like the sabres and
 bayonets in an armory. Here and there
 on the ceiling is complete skeleton set into the plastering, quite suggestive of an
 outline by Flaxman or Retzch. It re-
 quires highly cultivated taste to appre-
 ciate this. The poor monks! they were
 not very ornamental in life; but time IS
 full of compensations. Death seem to
 have relieved them of one unhappy char. acteristic. .'There is no disagreeable
 scent. says the author of The Marble
 Faun, describing this place. 'ssuch as
 might have been expected from the decay
 of so many holy persons, in whatever
 odor of sanctity they may have taken
 their departure. Tie same number of
 living monks would not smell half so