disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they have been over-careful to
render them magnificent and impregnable,--as witness the builders of
the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and most other
personages whose mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to attract the
violator; and as for dead men's hair, I have seen a lock of King Edward
the Fourth's, of a reddish-brown color, which perhaps was once twisted
round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore.

The direct lineage of the renowned characters that lie buried in this
splendid chapel has long been extinct. The earldom is now held by
the Grevilles, descendants of the Lord Brooke who was slain in the
Parliamentary War; and they have recently (that is to say, within
a century) built a burial-vault on the other side of the church,
calculated (as the sexton assured me, with a nod as if be were pleased)
to afford suitable and respectful accommodation to as many as fourscore
coffins. Thank Heaven, the old man did not call them "CASKETS"!--a vile
modern phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink
more disgustfully than ever before from the idea of being buried at
all. But as regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet
been contributed; and it may be a question with some minds, not merely
whether the Grevilles will hold the earldom of Warwick until the
full number shall be made up, but whether earldoms and all manner of
lordships will not have faded out of England long before those many
generations shall have passed from the castle to the vault. I hope not.
A titled and landed aristocracy, if anywise an evil and an incumbrance,
is so only to the nation which is doomed to bear it on its shoulders;
and an American, whose sole relation to it is to admire its picturesque
effect upon society, ought to be the last man to quarrel with what
affords him so much gratuitous enjoyment. Nevertheless, conservative
as England is, and though I scarce ever found an Englishman who seemed
really to desire change, there was continually a dull sound in my ears
as if the old foundations of things were crumbling away. Some time or
other,--by no irreverent effort of violence, but, rather, in spite of
all pious efforts to uphold a heterogeneous pile of institutions that
will have outlasted their vitality,--at some unexpected moment, there
must come a terrible crash. The sole reason why I should desire it to
happen in my day is, that I might be there