TOPICS OF THE DAY.
CONDUCT OF THE FUNERA.L.
THE funeral is over, and we are all relieved, for one great duty is discharged. We could not have been content with less than the performance of such a tribute, and yet while it was in progress we felt that it was too much. The nation has been convoked to lay its hero in the tomb, and it is an onerous and cumbersome and great business to convoke a nation. But in the very burdensome- ness of the task England realized to herself a sense of her own regard for the departed chief ; that was the object of the pageant, and that object has been attained. It may be said that every class and section of the country contributed to that recognition in its own fashion. The Church lent its cathedral and its so- lemnities; the Executive lent its Royal countenance and its authority ; the learned bodies lent their sanction ; the Army, its strength and pomp ; the Parliament, its facilitating laws and its public funds; the People its immense presence. English- men have a maxim, that they do not value that for which they do not pay ; and on that principle the very money-cost of the ceremony of Thursday will present it most forcibly to the English eye ; and the Englishman will take a pride in surveying the price of that which he has bestowed upon his Wellington. He feels that he has done it handsomely ; and he proudly lays his hand upon the bill as a certificate of that fact.
On the other hand, there was something infelicitous in the par- ticular method by which this national sanction was called together. The long delay of the ceremony after the substantive occasion for it, the public negotiations between different bodies of the state, and the unconcealed but separate efforts to form the pageant, too openly exposed the machinery to the naked eye. That it was an impressive pageant—that it did express a great national idea—that it spoke elo- quently the national sentiment in regard to a national man, we all admit; and yet there is a just feeling, that the spontaneity, the completeness, and the genuineness of the manifestation, are abated by the sight of that machinery. It was a real thing, but has been made to wear the aspect of a getting-up. Enthusiasm wearied itself with its own appliances. The sentiment was overlaid by the timber, the estimates, and the plans ; the thing was done so hand- somely that the material -was in. excess of the spiritual. It is partly belonging to that mistake that the funereal observance was attended by a painful abundance of excited curiosity and luxurious festivity. The national funeral grew to be an enormous Irish wake.
It is true that the solemn occasion was never entirely forgotten; that as the procession approached the bystanders hushed their busy tongues, and that as the body passed heads were uncovered. But there had been the breakfast before, and there was the luncheon to come; there had been a fever of preparation, and there remained a fever of retrospection. It may be truly said that the funeral of Wellington was performed between a roaring night of bustle in the metropolis and a second roaring night to finish with. Re- flection saddens to think that even in the midst of death life greedily pursues its trivialities. "Eat and drink, though tomor- row we die," might have been the motto of those who assisted on the path of Wellington from the state chamber to the grave.
Gratified at the general tribute of respect must have been those in the procession who were the friends or the companions in arms of the veteran hero; but more than one sombre mourner, perhaps the deepest in his sadness, must have been shocked as the corpse of his chief thus ran the gauntlet through crowding and discordant gayeties. Were this the final event of the kind, it would be ungracious to say that we might have had the national tribute without much that has marred it. As an expression of dignified mourning, it may be questioned whether the gorgeous funeral of Wellington can vie with the less pretending or studied obsequies of Daniel Web- ster, or with the hurried burial of Sir Sohn Moore at Corunna. If the soldier's funeral is mentioned, that of Moore instantly occurs as the most soldierly and mournful. Both of these ceremonies were spontaneous, both were the direct and unadulterated result of the natural feeling. An expression of feeling might have been drawn even from a larger concourse than that which attended Moore or Webster, not less easily, had a more decisive course been taken. To fulfil duties of that sort is precisely the function of the Executive. The Executive Ad- ministration acting under the Crown should have taken upon itself the duty of making the arrangements ; and all that was needed might have been carried on promptly and thoroughly without the stimulants of daily iteration in newspa- pers. The Royal orders would have sufficed to bring together all the representatives of the State, all the soldiers of the Army ; the Royal orders, through the proper departments, would have sufficed to direct the formation and route of the procession; the Royal in- vitation would have been accepted by Parliament not less willingly if it had come in a finally-arranged shape; much shorter notice would have sufficed to secure all needful preparations for maintaining order in the streets of London, without inviting that odious parade of showman advertising and busy hammering, that contributed to detract from the moral effect of the pageant And all this might have been done weeks ago, without waiting for the concurrence of Parliament, or for some of those studied details which burden rather than enrich the ceremony. It ?night have been so ; but it matters not now, save as the precedent tells upon the future. These mi- nor faults will be forgotten, as the timber and the ropes of the barriers and scaffolding, and the street-mud, have been or will be carried away ; and history, with its broad pencil, will only record that the Sovereign, the Legislature, and the People, joined in conveying Wellington to the tomb.
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