ould be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the
monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by
contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting
monument that no repetition can stale.

The artistic cowardice of the English is perhaps the clue to the
mystery. Your Englishman is always afraid to commit himself to criticism
without the refuge of a _tu quoque_. He is covered dead, just as he is
covered living, with the "correct thing." A respectable stock-in-trade
is proffered him by the insinuating shopman, to whom it is our custom to
go. He is told this is selling well, or that is much admired. Heaven
defend that he should admire on his own account! He orders the stock urn
or the stock slab because it is large and sufficiently expensive for his
means and sorrow, and because he knows of nothing better. So we mourn as
the stonemason decrees, or after the example and pattern of the Smiths
next door. But some day it will dawn upon us that a little thought and a
search after beauty are far more becoming than an order and a cheque to
the nearest advertising tradesman. Or it may be we shall conclude that
the anonymous peace of a grassy mould is better than his commercial
brutalities, and so there will be an end of him.

One may go from end to end of this cemetery and find scarcely anything
beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some
degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near
this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ.
In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is
to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is
the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure,
with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely
restful against the serried vulgarity around it.

But the tradesman ghoul will not leave us; he follows us up and down,
indecently clamouring his name and address, and at last turns our
meditation to despair. Certain stock devices become as painful as
popular autotypes. There is the lily broken on its stalk; we meet it
here on a cross and there on an obelisk, presently on the pedestal of an
urn. There is the hand pointing upward, here balanced on the top of an
obelisk and there upon a cross. The white-robed angel, free from the
remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again. "All this is
mine," says th