Mr. Seymour Haden has concluded this week his very prolix
and pedantic communications to the Times, in favour of the very sensible reform which he proposes in our customs of burial, with a letter in which he maintains that the burial of the dead of London should no longer be left to voluntary manage- ment; that the cemeteries are repeating over again all the mis- chiefs of the London churchyards, though on a larger scale ; that the Board of Works should have the regulation of the matter, and a cemetery be chosen to the East of London and North of the Thames,—in the neighbourhood of Piir- fleet, or thereabouts,—where the soil is said to be particularly favourable for assimilating without danger to any one the mate- rials of the body,—and that 1,000 acres should be obtained there, which, with Woking Cemetery, where there are already 1,000 acres of exceedingly suitable land, would allow for a great increase in the population, and indeed, would admit of 200,000 persons being buried every year, without any grave being used a second time till the first body deposited in it was quite crumbled to dust,—for which process he allows from seven to ten years. There is weight enough in these recommendations, but Mr. Haden diminishes their force by the absurd parenthetical remarks he frequently interposes,—as, for instance, that what men really have at heart in the public funerals of the great, is to do honour to the bones, as distinguished from the bodies of the dead,—a most remark- able suggestion, as if it had ever occurred to anybody that the bones of the late Duke of Wellington, for instance, had any superior claim of reverence over his flesh and blood ; and, indeed, Mr. Haden's whole style of exposition is too like a fine imitation of that of the mournful profession he chiefly attacks. Still, his letters, when, as he would say, they have been reduced in the memory by the process of gradual decay or iipimexaihric to those " bones " of thought which "we really wish to honour," are useful, and we hope they may initiate the reform for which he contends.
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