3 NOVEMBER 1832, Page 14

PERE-LA-CHAISE Ill—PARIS AND LONDON.

Sedibus ut saltem pladdis in morte ciaieseam."

Is it error in calculation, or does the generation that devises a burial-ground avowedly intend only provision for self and imme- diate successor Pere-la-Chaise is an extensive cemetery; but if it be considered in relation to the vast city of Paris, the reservoir bears evidently no adequate proportion to what must be the influx, —the quarter of the dead is inconsiderable compared with that of the living. It is seldom that, in human works, what is executed on a prearranged plan and to a particular end, is marked with the character of greatness. Cities are sometimes grand, but they grow from age to age ; each adds to what has been done by its predecessors, and the result is the production of centuries. The dead cannot thus build and thus enlarge their abode ; the living select the quarter, and mark out its dimensions and it seems that man's limited views and affections cannot embrace more than his own and a following generation. It is creditable to the city of Paris to have effected what has been done, but the cemetery Ls already crowded—where find room for the generations to come? It is true, all are not concessions a perpotuite, but still the latter are as numerous as the monuments of any cost, and the number of these is prodigious ; and even when the ground is not acquit ciper- petuite, the right of first-corner long continues to be respected, They do not appear to have yet attained in France to the refine- ment of our holy churchyards, where the sexton will go you over the same space of ground once every five or seven years, ac- cording as the limits thereof are more or less circumscribed. The poor man who has buried his child—the brother who has left a brother in Pere-la-Chaise—may return the remaining years of his life, without fear of finding his humble cross thrown aside as lumber, and the spot sacred to his affections absorbed in the wide circumference of a rich man's tomb. But unless they have the means of eking out its inadequate extent by successive enclosures, sooner or later one of two things must happen,—either the poor must be outraged by the destruction of their family depositories, or Pere-la-Chaise must be locked up, and the father go elsewhere to set up his rest ; and the environs of Paris be studded with little cemeteries, instead of possessing one grand dormitory for the re- pose of its vast and turbulent population.

Had they whose benevolence planned this cemetery, compre- hended in their view the generations on generations that must flow on through the gates of death, even to the end of time, which is the site that would have been chosen for the City of the Dead ? On the heights of Belleville, the Butte de Chaumont, by 1VIenilmontant to Romainville, is a wide table-land, elevated above the plain below, where countless generations might lie without doing outrage to those who had preceded, or fear of being molested in their turn by those who were to come after them. This rising- ground—abandoned now to guinguettes and the fortifications of Maresehal Sorra, and more worthily occupied by the first than by the latter—lifting on high its caput pi niferum, would present an august memento mori to those who on the north and the east should speed on the wings of the diligence to plunge into the gayest capital in Christendom. On the south and south-by-west—quip/u- rimus urbi imminet, adversasque adspectat desuper arces—the eye commands a view as extensive as it can- well take in, and replete with objects as grand as the imagination can paint. From Vincennes to St. Cloud stretches a huge metropolis, here high-piled and dense, there running out—" as from his outmost works a broken foe "— in less regular lines and more interrupted masses, with agreeable interspersion of wood and grove, whence rise domes and towers, spires and pinnacles, shrined in the blue air, and reflecting from gilded vanes the last smiles of a setting sun. He that should re- tire hither to feed his fancy, or invigorate his philosophy, by the view of everlasting repose and thoughts beyond the world, might, from the silent graves of friend and fellow-citizen, as from a region impervious to human care, contemplate the world he had left; and, looking upon it as it were from out of eternity, obtain a juster con- ception of its proportions and its value. The life of cities, the throng of streets, the routine of society, the chace of frivolities, the whirl of business and pleasure, the heat of parties, the madness of ambition !—one that is plunged in this vortex of human passions and human vanities, may, indeed, feel, enjoy, and suffer much; but he is lost, poor wretch, in the eddy, and may drop without having once reflected on himself as a unit in the great whole, and without one glance into the vast infinity of being. Well were it then, if, casting up his eyes from the "hot, infectious throng," he were able to discern what might procure him a moment's abstrac- tion from the turmoil of affairs, to ask himself—" Why do I thus disquiet and chafe myself in vain ?—behold the end of all!" How tranquillizing to an over-anxious breast, how cooling to a flushed and feverish brow, throbbing over a brain distracted with ephe- meral passions, the spectacle of a quiet hill-side crowned with the tapering cypress, from whose dark verdure gleam marbles and mo- numents—here a cross and there a column—memorials of genera- tions passed away, that once flocked through these very streets, eager and clamorous, like the crowd around, and now reposing deep under the quiet of a blue heaven and the soft brilliancy of an autumnal evening! There, the still retreats of the dead, stretch- ing over the height, would overlook the metropolis of the living, spread out on the plain below—their destined home, their monitor, their hope or their terror, the balm of suffering and the annihila- tion of ambition. Pere-la-Chaise is not this; yet, with its neat mausoleums and funereal raree-shows, its roses and myrtles, its epitaphs that call up a smile or a tear—and the first nearly as often as the last—it is at once characteristic of the people and worthy of their politeness. It is a pleasing and even cheerful retreat, every way befitting a gay and amiable nation. Close and amicable, they are as throng in their graves as in their cafés;res sociable and as ekgantly boused M their sipultures de fannlle, as in their salons of the Chatissee d'Antin. Pere-la-Chai:se--Palais Royal—creations both of a people eminently fond of 'intercommunion, and never happy but when herded together. Here they laugh in gay parties, and converse ; and there, in 'Reties too, they lie, and, wonderful to say, are sileat ! Yet is not ?'ere-la-Chaise a spot favourable for specu- lation on life, death, and immortality. There is such an air of society, so much drawing-room elegance about the cemetery, that a man's reflections are not what they might be expected to be in the abodes of the dead ; and it is odds but that the traveller lapses, before he have got well half through it, into a train of thought that might have better become the Tuileries or the Luxembourg. It would be vanity to attempt a Pere-la-Chaise in the suburbs of London ; the myrtle blooms not there, and the cypress grows as a stranger. The genius of the people is even more opposed to it than the climate. Our's is a branch of the great European fa- mily very different from that of the French,—to whom the Franks have left little but their name, and in whose veins the Celtic blood is mixed, but not tempered with Gothic and Burgundian. By whatever name they be called—Saxon, Jute, or bane—Northmen, Norwegian, or Norman—our fathers are from northernmost Germany, and the yet remoter wilds of Scandinavia ; and the genius of our countrymen, sombre and pensive, still savours of the primeval forests whence issued the founders of their lineage. Their fancy crowns not Death with roses, nor strives to subdue his sternness into a smile, as is attempted, and not without suc- cess, in Pere-la-Chaise. There, not a skull, nor a bone, nor the image of one, is to be seen. Death's hollow eyes are lighted up with lilies—they have screened his bald pate with myrtle—they have plumped out his fallen chaps and flushed them with roses— that he smiles and smiles, and knows himself not. The Teutonic imagination, on the contrary, invests him with a gloom deeper than his own, and solaces itself by adding to his terrors. . . . . "Black he stands as Night,

Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, And shakes a dreadful dart."

It courts him in the long-drawn aisles of cathedrals, in vaults where the cheerful day is a stranger all too wanton for admission. It conjures him up in all his blackness ; and to divest him of his thick clouds and dark, were to rob him of his dignity, and forfeit the pleasing horror which the contemplation of him inspires. Su- perstition is feeble at Paris, and religion still feebler ; and they who love a text for self-gratulation and abuse of a people—at this moment, however misgoverned, Europe's bulwark against des- potism and soldier-law—may find one here ; but I apprehend it is Nature—" qua) tamen usque recurret"—that has so willed it ; and that the cause which has denied them a VIRGIL, a DANTE, or a MILTON, and restricted them to the Henriade of VOLTAIRE, is one and the same with that which has made them, of all the nations of Europe, the first to put away the traditions of their fathers. Their temperament is equal, their sensibility small, their vivacity excessive: they laugh much—a "passion hateful" to the poet as to the pietist : they are uniquely and ardently occupied with the present, they look not forward to what is to come, and make haste to forget what is past. Reverence for antiquity they have none : the organ of veneration I take to be very little, if at all, developed among them; and the anxious foresight that would penetrate the mystery even of death and the grave, is precluded by a thoughtless and reckless disposition. "Hang sorrow, care killed a cat,"—such, in homely phrase, is their motto ; tight, whole, and sound, they are ever ready, ever on the qui vive. The tear, if it spring, is chased by the laugh that hurries after ; and spleen and hate, and care and forethought, are alike forgotten in the ardour of pursuit, or drowned in the uproar of merriment.

" Dire au ciel : Je me fie Mon pro, a ta bonte; De ma philosophie Pardonne la gait: Que ma saison derniere Suit encore un printemps ; Eh gai! c'est la priere Du gros Roger-Bontemps."

With what solemn awe does the Scandinavian ear listen, for ex- ample, on solemn occasions, to the midnight bell, when his iron tongue tells one "unto the drowsy ear of night !" How intense is the stillness.of.an English audience, when the knell is rung that ushers Pierre to his grave ! That single incident would, on the french boards, have procured for Venice Preserved the advantage of as deep a damnation as ever play was damned withal. What is the midnight bell ?—the poker striking on an iron pot. What is a ruined wall crowned with the verdure of time ?—rubbish, to be re- Moved as a nuisance, or exploited, if it will pay. What are an- cestral observances ?—something absurd "avant la Revolution." What is Death ?—a thing not to be thought of where he is not, and to be made to look pretty where he is. The French pride themselves en a genius turned to the" positive ;" and the " positive " is the ene- my of the awful, the shadowy, and the sublime, which enter largely into the composition of:the highest flights of poetry. They are equally remote from melancholy,—a fearful gift, but the secret of ranch that is moving both, in poetry and prose: having it not, they Conceive it as they can, and-strange work their Romanticistes do make of it. It is a sad superiority at best ; be happy that you have it not: Nature made you BER.UNGERS, why perversely strive to be Bvuorfs ?

The English 'people, following:the bent of their genius, will at- tempt no pretty funeral garden in the vicinity of London. What would it be but a miserable account of dripping shrubs, and moss- grown walks edged with dank grass ; rows of square slabs bearing stonecutter formulas by way of inscription, with large provision of death's heads and thigh-bones ; and here and there a heavy sar- cophagus, garnished with a coat of arms supported by blubbering cherubs, docks et boOls ; the whole reflecting neither the senti- mental elegance of the French, nor the simple gravity of the Eng- lish character ? Were they who execute what should be the will of the British people, inspired with the sentiment of greatness. which belongs to the nation, they would attempt no parody of Parisian elegancies, but accomplish something more in uni- son with the character, and on a scale more proportioned to the extent, of the great city whose dead were to find there an adequate • repository. On the east of the British metropolis,or more near east by south, rises an eminence bearing on its shoulders a plain of wide extent; the ground for the most part unenclosed, and in every respect adapted to the purpose, even to the name, which is Black- heath. Thence may the traveller's eye discover, with a feeling not unlike dismay, more near, a forest of masts,—beyond, a boundless Pandemonium of buildings, here dimly descried in the gloom, there lost and buried in the blackest night of Tartarus— the modern Babylon, unique of cities, every thing great and every thing mean, sublime in smoke, and fog, and vastness—London ! How ill, mighty queen, would a pendant like Pere-la-Chaise, pretty and sentimental, become thy swart and colossal neck ! Instead thereof, let the plain above mentioned, stretched out," if need be," in yet wider circumference, be crowned with a fitting canopy of those lugubrious trees that love our soil and climate—the Norway fir, the mountain pine, the yew-tree's "venerable shade," and every son of the forest " cui suus horror iciest "—a grove tremendous and inviolable for ages- " Obscurum cingens connexis aera ratnis,

Et gelidas alte sutnmotis solibus umbras."

Here might the generations of the dead—the departed millions that once toiled from morning to night in the vast workhouse below, find a stern, but deep and inviolate repose. Why bring roses, or plant myrtles, to mock with a smile the graves of those on whom nothing ever smiled in life ? There, in that overgrown clay-built capital—sublime in spite of its brick—whose bounda- ries lie beyond ken, even when Jupiter has cleared the heaven of the dim cloud that mostly overhangs it—are to be found, cheek by jowl, the widest extremes of human vanity and human wretched- ness. There the starving female, as she drags herself miserable by the rich man's door, sickens at the effluvia of savoury and sweet that steam from his kitchen. There they carve them cor- nices, and gild them, and set off their effulgence by velvet of crimson exquisitely wrought and devised, and pour on them a blaze of light from lustres that flash intolerable day ; while all without is dark and dripping discomfort, the portion of thousands that wander houseless, or, worse, that find in their houses no pro- tection against the inclemency of the weather.

"Take physic, pomp ; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, And show the heavens more just."

Mighty bard ! poet of humanity ! in that city where haply these lines were written, they will not scruple to take thy words in vain; and, thrown their listless length on soft couches, will, from creamy and hot-pressed pages, lisp forth thy lines in the accents of a pseudo-pity, while the wretch dies not the less of starvation at their gates. There, in the capital of the British empire, on which the sun never sets—vain boast !—when the core is rotting with squalor and disease,

"Affliction reigns, and evei-stinging Cares, And pale Diseases dwell, and sad Old Age, And Fear, and Hunger, counselling ill deeds, And sordid Want—forms terrible to view !

Labour and Death, and Death's half-brother, Sleep.'

The great London burial-ground may be awful from vastness,* and shrouded in the gloom proper to the King of Terrors ; but for God's sake let it not be a Pere-la-Chaise, to throw a couleur de rose over the bare ribs of mortality ; but let it wear the character of death in all its sternness, as in the living cemetery hard by is life in all its hardships. Enough—the wretch asks but this—Grief will there be hushed, and carking Cares disquiet no more ; Disease will there be cured, and sad Old Age rid of his burden; Fear will no longer palpitate, nor Hunger persuade to evil deeds, nor Poverty be disgraceful ; Labour will there find rest, and Death and his half-brother Sleep reign paramount. For this, in the eye of the Britannic People in Parliament assembled, will be no place for Privilege to usurp and exclude his brother Dust. Dives may lie here, if he please, or rot elsewhere, but he must submit to lie by Lazarus. Lords and Earls may pitch their mausoleums here; but the humble stone, the wooden cross, the hoop-bound grave, shall lie around and have equal honour. It shall be the People's burial- ground—the grave of London—where bones, that ached from seven even unto seventy, shall rest in peace, protected by public law, and snbject but to one resurrection. Distinctions of sect shall here be unknown, as of rank—sharers in one common hu- manity—brethren at least in death, if divided by difference of creed in life. No priest shall say, "This is my demesne-- this is my freehold—you are a Papist and hold seven sacra- ments, and therefore shall not have seven feet of your mother earth"—miserable bigot amongst a free and generous people ! ad- mired by foreign nations as an obscene bird of night in the bright-. ness of the, noonday grove. Catholic shall this burial-ground b. for It'shali be universal.- The &Bile road riiiinitit throtigkit will • • Mike it •but-the more clalSical, as well as the more nieful; :The ways"!—Appian or Flaminian—that ran to the fartheet corners of the Empire, were accompanied, for leagues out of the.Imperial city, by 'the monuments of departed Roman generations: The stranger from the Continent shall send his eye religiously through the dark retreats--/oca node silentia /ate—where glimmer the monumental Marbles like sheeted ghosts ;• and emerging, as from a Cimmerian' region, into the splendid day of the great • city,'. confess, with re- spect, the countrymen of MILTON, and a people capable of the grand, and careful of the dead.

- This is what the greatness of the Britannic People, adequately represented in Senate, would enact in one session and see achieved in .a second. But Squirearchy does nothing of all this. Squire- archy builds a park-wall, or erects a grapery, at most rears a palace, and calls it grandly—" Castle Glutimy ;" or plants an avenue Of limes,—not like CIMON the Athenian, for love of his fel- loW-citizens, and tO be remembered of them as they sit cool in the shade of the trees bequeathed them by his patriotism,—but merely, unambitious man ! to be remembered by "my heirs." Squirearchy ties a riband round one leg, and claps a star to one side ; and, having dived deep into the public purse, and built a mausoleum—for my- self—rots in sullen grandeur—a , wretched egotist even in death. Deepots have done great things; witness Rome, found of brick and left of marble—witness St. Petersburg, reared on the marshes of the Neva—witness the BOuanoNs—for God's sake -understand the old'ones—and 'their monuments. It is true, the People sweat for all this and pay for it all.; but there it is, worth its money; and when time cones round, the People that; like bees—sic vos non yebii—built it for another, swarm up one hot day in July, and take possession for themselves; and then, good easy folk! having rid it clean out, admit into, it some second devil worse than the first, who trenches it round with a foss, and loads its symmetry with ad- ditions as ill placed end heavy as itself. .Despotism is capable of a certain. grandenr peculiar to its. condition, , and raises upon the earth what • may serve Tor its monument after it is gathered to its fathers., Squirearchy-has prepared his monument too—you may se'e it in the city ef Yokk, in the walls of the county gaol, high- clitibing like his piesnmption, and cuclosieg a heart tender and coiscientiouS as his own. . • -There be two things which must not be left to Squirearchy—the settlement of -Ireland; and the London cemetery on Blackheath.

Squirearchy would deluge the first with blood, and call it a pad- fieation- because his Bishops were pacified; and for the last, he would levy half a million for ground to be laid out for the Use of the "public," and then enclose it for his own especial benefit, and leave the "public" the advantage of the dust of his chariot-wheels. He • wouldplant it pretty, like one of those parks so statistically described by Muckier Puskau (Gods ! what a name for the lover of a Julie !), with a piece of water in the middle, and in the water a piece of rock-work, and on the rock-work a hermitage, &c.; and he would admit the tenths of, all such as could afford a sculpture that should not diseredit his' own stately mausoleums, and would especially interdict all hoop-bound graves, black oil-cloth covered raree .shows, wooden croises, and other simple memorials of the pcior, not disdained by the more generous spirit of French chivalry : and,,therefore, once more, Squirearchy shall not have the laying out of the great London Burial-ground on Blackheath : this must be reserved for the British Senate, legislating for the benefit of the British People. 'Far Worse than all that has been said, Squirearchy would build a 'porter's lodge; and would post at the gate a burly beadle, in laced coat and hat and gold-headed • truncheon; with divers New Policemen, "if need be," to scare away "all persons" convicted of an appearance, in the judgment of said beadle, "not respectable like; and " straightly charged" to admit into the presence of the dead' only entire hats and coats guiltless Of a darn. And Squirearchy would ground this exclusion on' an assumption, wbichnone ,but•he could ever have the baseness and the' audacity to allege of fellow,-countrymen,—to Wit, that the English' people are such brute beasts as to be incapable even of respecting the sanctuaries of the dead ! But a national legislature would know that the,Efiglish heart is a good heart—that if any are rotten at the coke, itis Squirearchy himself—that at any rate such exclusion is not a means-of Mending it, if bad—that there is a softening and subduing influence about the tomb—that the grave is a more effective poacher:than the pulpit—that in its presence avarice vows to be' charitable, pride to be humble, and fraud to reform and be honest. And were the groat cemetery made, as it would be, the last retreat of whom the. nation loved and respected—there being *no sycophant in lawn to close its gates against the bones of a BYRON would soon become a haunt whither genius wciuld resort to imbibe its inspirations, and patriotism to swear to be true to the death,—where the humblest citizen might come and leave his crown on the grave of a RUSSELL—victim of tyranny or its de- stroyer—without the necessity of bribing some pampered drone, carrying a silver staff, and called a verger. Here also, where all comers, would be welcome, might be seen monuments other than of.,these loved and revered by the nation, but not less instructive. The titled traitors to the . commonwealth, the panders of power, the batteners on the public purse, that wring from stupid peasants awl starving mechanics their vile trash, to plant one more jewel onthe :brow of wife or daughter—even these would not be grudged a concession a perpetuite ; and the people that gave them a share of their burial-ground,' would not refuse them an inscription too. Was it,some very great man Inc:eed, who had made.his house and fortune at the people's expense they would write on his marble n, 0e of the titles which had cost.n mausoleum as thus, forgetting them so. dear—" To the immortal ine,norY of his Grace George Tce' s by sea andXrand2 Monk,' Duke of Albemarle,* Commander-in-Chief of his Majesty's Fo. Groom of the Stole, Master of the Horse, NI'S, Cats, 4-c. 4.c, 4.c. Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

" Vendidit hic auro patriam." This fellow sold his country for gold and what you: read. •

Was it some JEFFERIES, headlong to condemn, and bloody claim execution, he should have his full honours; of the Pleas, or the -Bench, or the Exchequer, as might be; and an epitaph of which every line should sing out, loud as the unhappy Theseus on his eternal seat,—

" piscite justitiam, moniti !" 0 be warned by me, respect justice !

Was it some thunder-tongued patriot, who, after vociferating on the People's side, and imposing "silence aux trente !" should make a bargain with Power to undo or defeat all that had been done for the People, even though death ,should step in to save him, like another MIRAREAU, from, the ignominy of the fact, the 'People would not forget it in his epitaph :— ; Fisk leges pretio atque refixit."

This statesman made laws, and unmade them for filthy lucre and court favour.

But was it Something rarer than the great—some high-minded, eloquent, energetic, honest man—hero or'sage—who had paid his debt to nature, breathing his last sigh for the people he loved, we would bear him on our shoulders to his grave; we would build him his tomb high up among those whom his benevolence had relieved, and his generous heart defended ; we would Come—the poorest among us—to seek out his grave, and bid him, hail and farewell ! the poet should write his praise, and the people sing it with their evening hymn. . . Nor, though our sky be murky, and our cemetery dark and drear as death, should Beauty lack her 'rose—" sweets to the sweet"— nor the poet his bays, nor the hero his laurel. Only let what af- fection planted be affectionately tended.. It grieves one: to see aught withering or neglected here. Not there at all, its absence would not be remarked; but an inscription defaced, or full of love and overgrown *with nettles, a myrtle that dies, a crown rotting unreplaced, a marble column broken and not repaired, a chair for communing with the defunct—wife or husband—and dropping to pieces from disuse,—these are sad outrages on human feeling, and mortifying commentaries -on the brevity of man's affections—" 0 heavens ! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet !" "Perish the roses and the flowers of kings !" but let the love of friends be at least coeval with themselves, else were life "as tedious as a twice- told tale."

And Squirearchy too—poor Squirearchy—" Au! wad ye tak a thought and mend, ye aiblins might"—Squirearchy, that would not build us a cemetery, shall, if he pleases, have a share of our's —which cannot but be a comfortable thought to him, now that the poor soul is near his end, and has but one leg left to stand on. He shall have any corner he likes, wherein to establish his quarter— to have his West End and his May Fair, his St. James's (with the Hells too, if so it pleases him), his Almack's for the fairs Ins daughters, and he shall be as grand as he can Make himself— only he shall not be exclusive; but where his marble Column rises, the poor man's briar-bound sod shall be reapected.. Be this as it *ill, a people that deposits its dead in the heart of its crowded cities, buries over the same ground once every five or seven years, tramples on the feelings of every father, brother, and widow, not rich enough to buy the spot and wall it round, where lie the cherished remains of the dearly loved;—such a people, though polished to the very acme of drawing-rooms and levees, stars and garters, is branded with at least one unquestionable trait of barbarism.

• "It faut," says CHAUMETTE, the Jacobin censor and apostle of reason,—who among his extravagancies seems to have bail an idea or two, poetical at least, if not quite reasonable, and who has commented SHARSPEARE, without luxe:sing it—" ii fact, quo redid et le parr= des Sears iappellent les idees les plus dunces ; jez voudrais, S ii kait possible, fouvoir dans Is parfum d'une rose rcspirer Fame de mon pew!"