Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. V, October, 1850, Volume I.

ing its feet, and goes down your throat, unwashed, with small respect for your gentility. You must look abroad, therefore, for some elements of an unwh

we are content: at present this is only gossip.1 On one of the lowest terraces of hell, says Dante, he found a Cordelier, who had been dragged thither by a logical demon, in defiance of the expostulations of St. Francis. The sin of that monk was a sentence of advice for which absolution had been received before he gave it: "Promise much, and perform little." In th

ter, broached a theory. "Our souls," the Rev. Chancellor informed us, "consist of the essence, extract, or gas contained in the human body;" and, that he might not be [pg 603] vague, he made specia

e elements and rich essences of humanity are too subtle and volatile to continue long with the corpse; but soon disengage themselves, and escape from it. After which nothing remains but the foul refuse in the vat; the mere caput mortuum in the crucible; the vile dust and ashes of the tomb. Nor does inhumation, however deep in the ground, no

moderns pardon it. A young Cambridge student, airing his wisdom at a dinner-party, was ingenious upon the Theory of Winds. He was most eloquent concerning heat and cold; radiation, rarefaction; polar and equatorial currents; he had brought his peroration to a

reason, and-th

n and other gases! And where do the Sanitary Reformers suppose that, after death, their gases will go-they who, in lif

cent run. Our party runs. There is a race for prior attention when they reach the ground. We become interested. We perceive that one undertaker wears gaiters, and the other straps. We trot behind them, betting with each other, you on Gaiters, I on Straps. I win; a Deus ex machina saves me, or I should have lost. An over-goaded ox rushes bewildered round a corner, charges and overthrows the foremost coffin; it is broken, and the body is exposed-its white shroud flaps upon the mud. This has occurred once, I know; and how much oftener, I know not.

nt, I am taught that of the old coffin-wood dug up out of the crowded church-yards, a large quantity that is not burned, is dried and ground; and that ground coffee is therewith adulterated in a wholesale manner. It communicates to cheap coffee a good col

f of corpses have been hidden under ground, in patches, here and there, among the streets of London

the dead. If our lawgivers should fear the becoming neighborly with Dante's Cordelier, and therefore absolutely interdict more burials in London, still you are safe. They shall not trample on the graves that are. We can agitate, and we will agita

g