The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
Have we not heard Liebig indignantly complain of our importing immense quantities of bones from abroad, thereby draining the fair foreign fields of their very life-blood—scouring as we are said to do foreign battle-plains, that the bony reliques of warriors who fought a good fight in their day, may now be of further avail to make our bread? An English satirist of German sentimentalism pictures a contemplative young Teuton, at dinner time, pausing over his sauer kraut, as he calls to mind that the churchyard wherein his ancestor was decently deposited, has been converted into a kitchen garden; and the conviction flashes upon him that what was a distinguished man is now on the table in the form of cabbage.
Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a “practical suggestion” as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the interest of humanity, “the honour of the dead should be abolished,” and all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones contained in them may “supply to plants the power of creating fresh men”?
It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey’s letters from the East that mention is made of the writer’s seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people busily engaged in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one’s skeleton for thousands of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a gigot that consists in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.
That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints, of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new ramparts. “Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”
Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his bones for jewels? But telle est la vie—or rather, in such a connection, la mort.
The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare’s anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact of Swift’s larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the purloiner in America,—of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about Pope’s skull,—and of Mathews’s thigh-bone circulating from house to house.
Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes post mortem with the text with which we started, of Jezebel’s scattered remains on the face of the field, we call to mind Ben Jonson’s description (only too historically true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; “these fingers, and these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart....
“The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus,
And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world,