he desire that his carcase should render insalubrious the atmosphere which so many of his fellow-citizens must breathe weekly or oftener? The sects are rich enough to purchase burial-grounds for themselves. It would, however, be well that there were public cemeteries, unconsecrated, which should be open to all either gratis or on payment of a small fee. Numbers perish under circumstances which make it highly unfit that they should be interred with holy offices, and yet no indignity should be inflicted on the remains of the vilest malefactor. Now the appointment of burial grounds open to all, would prevent the desecration of religious rites, and at the same time avoid any positive stigma on the deceased. It were well, also, that when new churches were erected in the populous parts of cities, no burialgrounds should be attached to them; or, rather, as indeed is often the case, that the cemetery should be at a distance in the outskirts.

Lest these suggestions should be spurned as the crudities of a modern liberal, I will subjoin the words of honest Latimer, the martyr:-

"I do marvel that London, being so rich a city, hath no burying place without; for, no doubt, it is an unwholesome thing to bury within the city, specially at such time when there be so great sicknesses and many die together. I think, verily, that many a man taketh his death in Paul's church-yard; and this I speak of experience, for I, myself, when I have been there some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill-favoured, unwholesome savour,

that I was the worse for it a great while after, and I think not but it is the occasion of much sickness and death."

If London was so rich a city in Latimer's day, it is not much poorer now. Some difference there certainly is in the frequency of pestilential diseases, but the good bishop's opinion still holds good in the main.

1835.

ON HOLY THINGS.*

OBLATOIRE: An iron instrument with which the sacramental bread is made. Laud gave great offence to the Puritans, grossly superstitious in their dread of superstition, by directing the solid elements to be cut with a consecrated knife. Now, I hold it most meet and comely, that all places, garments, and instruments, employed in public worship, should be so far holy, as to be exempt from all service to the world; it is well that they should bear a peculiar and significant form, to imitate which, in utensils of common use, is bad taste. Let no one make his nutting-stick like a pastoral staff, or transfer the symbolic ornament of a cathedral to his villa, kennel,

pigsty, or latrina. But superstition, yea, idolatry, or worse, conjuration takes place, when these things are reverenced without a direct and conscious reference to Him, for whose service they are set apart; when they become talismans; when they are believed

* The Note-Books from which this and the following article (on Pews) are taken, might form an interesting contribution to a "General Dictionary of Words and Things."

to work upon body or spirit by any occult or sympa, thetic virtue; when they are set up as scarecrows to frighten away dæmons; when they are supposed to conciliate grace, or to atone for offence, as sin, or free-will offerings; and when their exhibition is prostituted for the profit or power of any order, regular or secular.

ON PEWS.

BANC, French: a bench, form, sand-bank. They render King's Bench, Banc du Roi; Banc férmé, dans une Eglise, a pew.

Q. When did pew acquire its ecclesiastical-Archdeacon Hare would not call it, sacred-signification? The word occurs in Shakspeare, King Lear, Act III., Scene 4. Tom of Bedlam complains that the Fiend had laid “knives under his pillow, and halters in his pue." I am not clear as to the precise meaning of pew in this passage, but Tom does not mean to describe himself as a church-goer. Rather it implies a closet or retiring-room. Neither in French, German, Italian, nor Latin, can I find any word to enable me to guess at the etymology of this poor monosyllable, which some, haply better churchmen than etymologists, or punsters, might fetch from puer-the French, not the Roman. Private boxes did not make a fairer pretence for uproar in the never-to-be-forgotten days of O. P., than these private prayer boxes furnish for the more decorous, but not less angry, remonstrances

of the Philarchaists. To make them as odious in High Church eyes as possible, their introduction has been ascribed to the Puritans. I am not deep enough in Church history to know whether this charge is true. But they were a very natural excrescence of the undue predominance of the sitting part of the service, which has survived the troubled times when the pulpit was, what the press is now, the great engine of agitation; and the introductory prayer served the purpose of a gazette; when the Church, in short, rivalled the barbers, the bakers, the smithie and the Rialto, as a news-shop and mart of sedition. I thoroughly revere the zeal of the Anglo-Catholics in restoring prayer— public, united, congregational prayer-to its due eminence among religious duties. I approve of their design to restore to devotion her ancient and comely drapery, so long as the ritual is employed as an aid, not as a substitute for heart-worship; and while no superstitious materialism, no talismanic conjuration, no fetish worship is smuggled under the outward and visible; and while ceremonies are not multiplied to a distracting and burdensome excess. As for pews, they are unquestionably ugly, whether empty or full, they are utterly out of keeping with the style of our old and holiest churches. They make the house of prayer too much of a house of merchandise, and what is worst of all, they are a constant source of bickering and ill will. I never knew a church built or repaired, but that the distribution of the pews set divers individuals, if not the whole parish at loggerheads, causing some to desert the

church altogether, and others to attend it for worse than worldly purposes. Often, too, they exhibit much of the tasteless ostentation of new wealth, and are fitted up with a sybarite self-indulgence, that might seem to arise from a gross misinterpretation of the text of St. Paul (1 Cor. xii. 23), which says that those members of the body which we esteem less honourable, upon those we bestow, (or put on) more abundant honour. A text, mistaken also, by our ancestors, in the days of embroidered brayettes, trunk-hose, and by the ladies of the fashion with their callypygian protuberances. But in removing the evil, much caution will be requisite. Pews have been allowed to become private property, a source of profit both to the Church and to individuals. They are recommended by that love of family privacy, which the English esteem a virtue, and the safeguard of all domestic virtue, but which they are apt to carry to places where it is absurdly out of place,— to holy places where none should seek his own, and to public places, which those who dislike publicity should never frequent at all. Still, people do like to have their families about them in church, which certainly enables them to keep their children in better order; and too many like to see their tenants and servants at a safe distance, which servants at least are very far from objecting to. Should a minister take upon himself to remove or throw open the pews, he would probably be accused of levelling and popularity-hunting; if not, of a covert desire to subvert all rights of property, and it is to be feared,

VOL. II.

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