erland very much resemble each other, and are altogether unlike
the graveyards of Great Britain and her children. It is to the
villages we should naturally go for primitive memorials of the dead,
but in all the continental villages which I have visited memorials
of a permanent character, either old or new, are scarcely to be seen.
Occasionally a stone slab may be encountered, but almost always of
recent date. At Laufen in the Canton of Zurich, near the Falls of the
Rhine, I selected almost at random the examples of memorials shewn in
my sketch (Fig. 96), one or other of which was at the head of nearly
every grave.
FIG. 96.--AT LAUFEN.
The average height of these mementoes was about 2 feet, and all the
dates which I saw were of the last twenty-five years. Permanence
indeed is apparently not considered as it is with us in the like
circumstances. The British gravestone is trusted to perpetuate at
least the names of our departed friends down to the days of our
posterity, but the provision made by our neighbours seems to have
been for the existing generation only. Posterity does not trouble the
villagers of Switzerland nor their prototypes of other nations around
them. This fact was strongly exemplified at Neuhausen, a small place
on the other bank of the Rhine, "five minutes from Germany" we were
told.
FIG. 97.--AT NEUHAUSEN.
In the churchyard at this place was one handsome tombstone, shewn in
the drawing, erected apparently in 1790. This was evidence of somewhat
ancient art, and I looked about for the old gravestones which should
have kept it company. Erect in its place there was not one, but in
the remotest corner of the enclosure I came upon several stones lying
flat, one upon another, the uppermost and only visible inscription
bearing the recent date of 1870! Only twenty years or so "on sentry"
at the grave, and already relieved from duty! There was likewise a
miscellaneous heap of old crosses, etc., of iron and wood, the
writing on which had disappeared, and they might reasonably have been
condemned as of no further service; but that gravestones in perfect
preservation should have been thought to have served their full
purpose in a little over twenty years, and be cast aside as no longer
requisite, was a remarkable lesson in national character. All the
graves were flat, and at the head of every recent one was a small iron
slab bearing a number. Many of those which had crosses were hung with
immortelles, compo
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