OLD BURYING GROUND. 99 tionally supposed to mark the grave of Whalley: -if it be so, his bones must have been removed there by Dixwell; an affecting act of pious friendship." I have seen both the grave stones which are here alluded to; they still stand in the old burying ground behind one of the churches. The inscription on the first is in rude characters, and is thus arranged; I. D Esq. Deceased March y The other stone, which has been supposed to commemorate Whalley, must have been erected over some other person whose name and history have been lost, for the date which has been generally read 1688, is in reality 1658. The mistake has arisen from a slight injury which the stone has in some former day received, and which has imparted 4 President Dwight, in his Travels, which have been recently reprinted in this country, communicates some additional information respecting these interesting men. Whalley had been secretly buried by his kind protector Mr. Russell, and his bones were many years after found within a rude tomb of mason work, covered with hewn flags, outside of Mr. Russell's cellar wall. The bones were discovered by a Mr. Gaylord, who had pulled down the house to rebuild it; he was personally known to Dr. Dwight and communicated to him this information. "After Whalley's decease," adds Dr. Dwight, "Goffe quited Hadley, went into Connecticut, and afterwards, according to tradition, to the neighbourhood of New York. There he is said to have lived some time, and the better to disguise himself, to to the figure 5, something of the shape of an 8, although it is still quite possible to decipher its original form. It is thus arranged: 1658 E. W. None of these relics will long survive, unless prompt measures are adopted for their preservation. The ancient burying ground is no longer used, the fence around it has gone to decay, and the mossgrown grave stones are rapidly disappearing under the dilapidating attacks of idlers, who are daily defacing these frail memorials of the dust which sleeps below. Many of them have been transferred to the new burying place, and although this destroys completely the charm of associated locality, it is better that they should be preserved any where, than destroyed altogether.5 The new cemetery which has sprung from the ashes of the old one, in simplicity of arrangement and elegance of monumental decoration, leaves at a It is said that being dis have carried vegetables at times to market. covered here, he retired secretly to the colony of Rhode Island, and there lived with a son of Whalley during the remainder of his life."-There is an obscure and very doubtful tradition that he was buried at Hadley. President Dwight's Travels, Vol. I. p. 353. American Edition. 5 An attentive and valuable correspondent writes me, that the whole of the old grave stones have now been removed to the new burying ground, with the exception of the two which are above alluded to. The ground has been levelled and sown with grass, and a marble slab affixed on the wall of the church, records the use to which it was seen. NEW BURYING GROUND. 101 great distance all others that I have any where It is in shape an oblong square, divided by a regular succession of avenues, crossing each other at right angles and skirted by rows of Lombardy poplars. The divisions which are thus formed are subdivided into spaces sufficient for family burying places, which are surrounded by a neat wooden railing painted white. There is scarcely a grave which has not a monument of one kind or other, and with the exception of those transferred from the old burying ground, they are almost universally of white or green marble. Some of those of white marble were executed in Italy; the green marble is found in abundance about two miles off, and is thought by some to bear a close resemblance to the Verd Antique. The monuments consist of obelisks, tables, and upright slabs at the head and foot of the grave; the obelisks are ranged in the centre of the principal subdivisions, in parallel rows, and at right angles to each other. The inscriptions which are cut on the white marble are generally painted black, those on the green are gilt and have a very rich effect. While the monuments in the old burying ground seem devoted to ruin, those in the new one although accessible to every passenger are treated formerly appropriated. I am afraid that the good taste which dictated the exception in favour of these supposed memorials of King Charles' judges, will not long avail them, if as I suppose the stones are left altogether without protection. (1822) with the most scrupulous respect. A neat fence surrounds the cemetery but openings are left at regular intervals, from which numerous foot walks cross the ground. The soil is composed of a light sand, and shoots from the poplars are springing up so numerously that they threaten to overrun it. Except the slight wooden railing there is no kind of fence around the graves; they are altogether free from those unsightly cages of cast iron by which our burying grounds in Glasgow are disfigured," and the enclosures are not defaced by those quaint emblems of mortality and grief, which so often with us betray the bad taste of the proprietors. A becoming respect is shown to the memory of the departed; and an air of impressive solemnity pervades the whole enclosure, which is not counteracted by any of those lugubrious and not unfre quently ludicrous allegorical devices, and misapplied quotations from scripture, which meet us at every step in our more ancient repositories of the dead. I have visited every shrine in Westminster Abbey, and have heard the marble-hearted verger dole out, in monotonous cadence, the dreary catalogue of names which are entombed and commemorated there; the damp of the long drawn aisles chilled me to the heart, and I trod upon the ashes of Monarchs, Barons, and Crusading Knights, The Medical School connected with Yale College, is under a bond to the State Legislature that no bodies shall be taken from the New Haven burying ground, for anatomical purposes. NEW BURYING GROUND. 103 whose sculptured figures, scattered around, were covered with the mutilations and dust of many generations; yet I doubt whether sympathy with my kindred dust were as strongly excited there, as in the burying ground at New Haven. It seems, as if the walls of the Gothic Cathedral had been intended to commemorate, that the departed were the great and the honourable of the earth, rather than that the great and the honourable as well as the lowly and obscure are doomed to be the prey of the spoiler. It comes more closely home to my feelings and circumstances, to read on the tablets of the more humble burying ground "Here rests his head upon a lap of earth, A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown." It shows good sense and right feeling, that this cemetery is left open to the foot of the fortuitous passenger;-levity may here be taught to reflect, inconsiderate youth to ponder the path which is before him, and perchance he who has been reft of those who were the dearest companions of his earthly pilgrimage, may be soothed by being reminded that a few light-winged years, at most, are all that intervene between him and the world of disembodied spirits. Happy for him and them if they "die the death of the righteous," that their latter end may be like his. Were I to venture a criticism upon this burying |