9th January, "in
your state room, when the fog makes your white blinds yellow, and the
wind howls in the brick and mortar gulf behind that square perspective,
with a middle distance of two ladder-tops and a background of Drury-lane
sky--when the wind howls, I say, as if its eldest brother, born in
Lincoln's-inn-fields, had gone to sea and was making a fortune on the
Atlantic--at such times do you ever think of houseless Dick?"

[98] He makes no mention in his book of the pauper burial-place at
Naples, to which the reference made in his letters is striking enough
for preservation. "In Naples, the burying place of the poor people is a
great paved yard with three hundred and sixty-five pits in it: every one
covered by a square stone which is fastened down. One of these pits is
opened every night in the year; the bodies of the pauper dead are
collected in the city; brought out in a cart (like that I told you of at
Rome); and flung in, uncoffined. Some lime is then cast down into the
pit; and it is sealed up until a year is past, and its turn again comes
round. Every night there is a pit opened; and every night that same pit
is sealed up again, for a twelvemonth. The cart has a red lamp attached,
and at about ten o'clock at night you see it glaring through the streets
of Naples: stopping at the doors of hospitals and prisons, and such
places, to increase its freight: and then rattling off again. Attached
to the new cemetery (a very pretty one, and well kept: immeasurably
better in all respects than Pere-la-Chaise) there is another similar
yard, but not so large.". . . In connection with the same subject he adds:
"About Naples, the dead are borne along the street, uncovered, on an
open bier; which is sometimes hoisted on a sort of palanquin, covered
with a cloth of scarlet and gold. This exposure of the deceased is not
peculiar to that part of Italy; for about midway between Rome and Genoa
we encountered a funeral procession attendant on the body of a woman,
which was presented in its usual dress, to my eyes (looking from my
elevated seat on the box of a travelling carriage) as if she were alive,
and resting on her bed. An attendant priest was chanting lustily--and as
badly as the priests invariably do. Their noise is horrible. . . ."

[99] "Thackeray praises the people of Italy for being kind to brutes.
There is probably no country in the world where they are treated with
such frightful cruelty. It is universal." (Naples, 2n