larly enough, seemed to reserve for these
gloomy tributes their sole attempt at facetiousness. Ingenious quirks
and puns, painful and complicate jokes (printed in italics that you may
not escape nor mistake them) bestrew these funeral verses. If a man
chanced to have a name of any possible twist of signification, such as
Green, Stone, Blackman, in doleful puns did he posthumously suffer; and
his friends and relatives endured vicariously also, for to them these
grinning death's-heads of rhymes were widely distributed.

It was with a keen sense of that humor which comes, as Sydney Smith
says, from sudden and unexpected contrast, that I read a heavily
bordered sheet entitled in large letters, "A Grammarian's Funeral." It
was printed at the death of Schoolmaster Woodmancey, and was so much
admired that it was brought forth again at the demise of Ezekiel
Cheever, who died in 1708 after no less than seventy years of
school-teaching. I think we may truly say of him, teaching at
ninety-three years of age,

"With throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar."

For the consideration and investigation of Browning Societies, I give a
few lines from this New England conception of a Grammarian's Funeral.

"Eight parts of Speech This Day wear Mourning Gowns,
_Declin'd_ Verbs, Pronouns, Participles, and Nouns.
The Substantive seeming the limbed best
Would set an hand to bear him to his _Rest_
The Adjective with very grief did say
Hold me by Strength or I shall faint away.
Great Honour was conferred on _Conjugations_
They were to follow next to the _Relations_

* * * * *

But Lego said, by me his got his Skill
And therefore next the Herse I follow will
A Doleful Day for _Verbs_ they look so _Moody_
They drove Spectators to a mournful Study."

I have a strong suspicion that this funeral poem may have been learned
by heart by succeeding generations of Boston scholars, as a sort of
grammatical memory-rhyme--a mournful study, indeed.

Funeral sermons were also printed, with trappings of sombreness,
black-bordered, with death's-heads and crossbones on the covers. These
sermons were not, however, preached at the time of the funeral, save in
exceptional cases. It is said that one was delivered at the funeral of
President Chauncey in 1671. Cotton Mather preached one at the funeral of
Fitz-John Winthrop in 1707, and another