without scruple or remorse
such superannuated vestiges employed in repairing the church fabric.
But this, be it understood, is only when the stone is irretrievably
beyond _memento mori_ service, and on the clear condition that it is
employed in the furtherance of religious work. It is true that a stone
is only a stone, whatever it may have been used for, but a peculiar
sanctity is in most minds associated with the grave, and we ought not
to run the risk of shocking tender-hearted people by degrading even
the dead memorial of the dead to profane and secular purposes. And
yet, what has become in too many cases of the old gravestones?
The very old ones we may perhaps account for, but where are the
middle-aged ones of the eighteenth century? It cannot be doubted,
alas, that they have in many churchyards been deliberately taken away
and destroyed to make room for new ones. Districts comprising many
parishes may be pointed out with all their old churches in the midst
of their old churchyards, but without one old gravestone standing.
The rule and practice have been to quietly remove the relics of the
forgotten sires in order to dig new graves for a new generation. The
habit, as just said, rules by districts, and this is the case in most
matters connected with the subject of this essay. It is a general and
remarkable truth that "good" and "bad" churchyards abound in groups.
The force of example or the instinct of imitation may explain the
fact, but it affords a sad reflection upon the morality of the
burial-place. Kirke White asks:

"Who would lay
His body in the City burial-place,
To be cast up again by some rude sexton?"

In my experience the chief sinner is not the city, but the country,
sexton.

Other memorials than the headstone are scarcely included in my
subject. Few of the slate slabs which answer the purpose in Wales
and some of the bordering counties can maintain their inscriptions in
legible condition for a very long period, and they are in all respects
inferior to stone in durability. This thought would have given no
anxiety to the writer of some Chapters on Churchyards which appeared
in "Blackwood's Magazine" about 1820. Said he:

"In parts of Warwickshire and some of the adjacent counties, more
especially in the churchyards of the larger towns, the frightful
fashion of black tombstones is almost universal--black tombstones,
tall and slim, and lettered in gold, looking for all the w