being, so far as I can find, the one solitary
instance of an allegorical gravestone among the thousands of
gravestones in the vast and carefully guarded burial-place in the City
Road. Strictly speaking, death's heads and crossbones are allegorical,
but these must be excepted for their very abundance and their lack of
novelty. Possibly, also, the lichen, damp, and London climate, which
have obliterated many of the inscriptions in this old cemetery, may
have been fatal to the low relief which is requisite for figure work
of the kind under consideration. But Bunhill Fields and similar places
in and near London and other great towns have taught me the law to
which I have already referred--the law that the picture-tombstone was
country bred, and could never have endured under the modern conditions
of life in or near the centres of civilization.

There are exceptions, perhaps many, to this ruling, as there are
exceptions to every other. For instance, a stone at the grave of a
Royal Artillery Officer in Woolwich Churchyard combines the emblems
of his earthly calling with those of his celestial aspirations in
a medley arrangement not unusual in rural scenes, but hardly to be
reconciled with the education and refinement of a large garrison and
school of military science which Woolwich was in 1760. This must be
set down as one of the exceptions which prove the rule.

FIG. 50.--AT WOOLWICH.

"To Lieut. Thomas Sanders, late of the Royal
Regiment of Artillery, who died March
1760, aged 60 (?) years."

There is a more recent case in which the same idea is pourtrayed in
somewhat different fashion on a headstone in the obsolete graveyard of
St. Oswald, near the Barracks at York. It is dedicated to John Kay,
a private in the Royal Scots Greys, who died July 9, 1833, aged 34
years.

But, on the whole, it may be accepted as an axiom that originality has
shunned the town churchyards, and the absence of curious varieties
of the gravestone among the well-sown acres of Bunhill Fields and
such-like places of the period at which they were by comparison so
abundant in less considered localities admits of a simple explanation.

In the eighteenth century town and country were much more divided than
they are now. London and the rural districts were not on their present
level. Taste in art and in the ordinary affairs of life was being
cultivated in town; it was not even encouraged in the country.
Education and refinement were