be traced. They were performing a
routine duty, of which no doubt their own consciences and their friends
and neighbors would have disapproved the omission; and that was all.
Nevertheless, the _picturesqueness_ of the general effect was perfect,
and it appealed to the imagination of a looker-on in a manner which to
many minds, more intent on sensational emotions than on discrimination
of social characteristics, would have caused the above remarks to appear
sadly ill-timed and out of place.

The scene which was meantime being enacted on the Pincetto, where the
wholly separated resting-places of the "Upper Ten" protest so
successfully against the leveling notion that in death all are equal, I
might have suggested many a mordant epigram to the cynically-minded
visitor. I fear that there is often something provocative of cynicism in
sundry of the aspects of fashionable devotion, but on such an occasion
as the present it could hardly be otherwise. Rachels in Parisian bonnets
and sweeping silk skirts, muttering over their rosaries for their
children on splendid cushions borne in due state by attendant
plush-clothed ministers, were contrasted in these realms of the
universal Leveler somewhat too strongly with the scene one had just left
in the (physically and socially) lower regions of the cemetery. Of
course hearts that beat beneath silken bodices may be wrung as bitterly
as those that serge covers. I am speaking only of those outward
manifestations which contributed to complete the strangeness of the
general spectacle which I had come out to see. The better tending of the
aristocratic portion of the cemetery, and the greater space between the
graves and their monuments, made it of course easier and less
disagreeable to pass among them and to note the bearing of individual
mourners. If the former scene had presented much that was indecorously
formal, here all was decorously formal. The routine, cut-and-dry nature
of the duty being performed exercised in either case its property of
numbing natural feeling, or at least the appearance of it.

On the whole, the experience offered by a visit to the great Roman
cemetery on the evening of the "Giorno dei Morti" is a singular and
curious one, as will be admitted, I think, by any one who may be tempted
by my example to go and see it.

T.A.T.

MR. MILL'S MOTHER.

The publication of the late Mr. John Mill's _Theism_ (writes a
correspondent from England) has again brou