-but I'll fix you all myself. Let's have no
laughing now on any provocation. [_Makes faces_.] Look yonder, that
hale, well-looking puppy! You ungrateful scoundrel, did not I pity
you, take you out of a great man's service, and shew you the pleasure
of receiving wages? Did not I give you ten, then fifteen, now twenty
shillings a week, to be sorrowful? and the more I give you, I think,
the gladder you are.

"_Enter a_ BOY.

"BOY. Sir, the grave-digger of St. Timothy's in the Fields would speak
with you.

"UNDERTAKER. Let him come in.

"_Enter_ GRAVE-DIGGER.

"GRAVE-DIGGER. I carried home to your house the shroud the gentleman
was buried in last night; I could not get his ring off very easilly,
therefore I brought you the finger and all; and, sir, the sexton gives
his service to you, and desires to know whether you'd have any bodies
removed or not: if not, he'll let them be in their graves a week
longer.

"UNDERTAKER. Give him my service; I can't tell readilly: but our
friend, Dr. Passeport, with the powder, has promised me six or seven
funerals this week."

* * * * *

These extracts are not from the manuscript of a modern
farce-comedy,[A] but belong to Steele's play of "The Funeral, or Grief
a la Mode." If they have about them all the air of _fin-de-siecle_
wit, so much the more eloquently do they testify to the freshness
of Dick's satire. Freshness, satire, and death! Surely the three
ingredients seem unmixable; yet when poured into the crucible of
Steele's genius they resulted in a crystal that sparkled delightfully
amid the lights of a theatre--a crystal which might still shed
brilliancy if some enterprising manager would exhibit it to a jaded
public.

[Footnote A: In "A Milk White Flag," a good specimen of "up-to-date"
farce, Mr. Hoyt dallies entertainingly and discreetly with the
blithesome topics of undertakers, corpses, and widows.]

In "The Funeral" the author impaled, with many a merciless slash of
the pen, the hypocrisy and vulgar flummery that characterised the
whole gruesome ceremony of conducting to its earthly resting-place
the body of a well-to-do sinner. For the average Englishman loved a
funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though
he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the
burial of his friends with the mockery, rather than the sincerity, of
woe.

Grief thus became a pleasure, and it was a pleasure, be it