lood-letting,
died of the kindly and godly-intentioned praying of his neighbors.

XV

FUNERAL AND BURIAL CUSTOMS

The earliest New Englanders had no religious services at a funeral. Not
wishing to "confirm the popish error that prayer is to be used for the
dead or over the dead," they said no words, either of grief,
resignation, or faith, but followed the coffin and filled the grave in
silence. Lechford has given us a picture of a funeral in New England in
the seventeenth century, which is full of simple dignity, if not of
sympathy:

"At Burials nothing is read, nor any funeral sermon made, but all
the neighborhood or a goodly company of them come together by
tolling of the bell, and carry the dead solemnly to his grave, and
then stand by him while he is buried. The ministers are most
commonly present."

As was the fashion in England at that date, laudatory verses and
sentences were fastened to the bier or herse. The name herse was then
applied to the draped catafalque or platform upon which the candles
stood and the coffin rested, not as now the word hearse to a carriage
for the conveyance of the dead. Sewall says of the funeral of the Rev.
Thomas Shepherd: "There were some verses, but none pinned on the Herse."
These verses were often printed after the funeral. The publication of
mourning broadsides and pamphlets, black-bordered and dismal, was a
large duty of the early colonial press. They were often decorated
gruesomely with skull and crossbones, scythes, coffins, and
hour-glasses, all-seeing eyes with rakish squints, bow-legged skeletons,
and miserable little rosetted winding-sheets.

A writer in the _New England Courant_ of November 12, 1722, says:

Of all the different species of poetry now in use I find the
Funeral Elegy to be most universally admired and used in New
England. There is scarce a plough jogger or country cobler that has
read our Psalms and can make two lines jingle, who has not once in
his life at least exercised his talent in this way. Nor is there
one country house in fifty which has not its walls garnished with
half a Score of these sort of Poems which praise the Dead to the
Life.

When a Puritan died his friends conspired in mournful concert, or
labored individually and painfully, to bring forth as tributes of grief
and respect, rhymed elegies, anagrams, epitaphs, acrostics, epicediums,
and threnodies; and singu