Letters of Peregrine Pickle

by George P. Upton

A woman who, in the earthly tabernacle, was the lingual scourge of her neighborhood, discovers that she was the loveliest of her sex, and is now an angel with the handsomest wings to be found in the whole ornithological tribe of the upper air.

A man whose highest ambition was to go through life quietly, doing as much good as he could for his fellows, and to go out of life like a gentleman, finds himself kicking up posthumous dust under a huge monument of the most elaborate description, gaudy with gilding, wreaths, chaplets, urns, torches and flowers.

Considering the number of nuisances among the living, the quantity of angels and cherubs in every graveyard is appalling, and it becomes a question worthy of consideration by the Academy of Sciences—the ultimate destination of the sinners and poor devils. All known grave yards are devoted exclusively to saints. In what ignota terra rest the bones of the sinners?

Now, I submit that a live man has some rights which a tombstone is bound to respect, and that when old Sniffles, who swindled me unmercifully, the other day, without any compunction, shuffles off his miserable coil, his tombstone shall not tell me he was a pink of honesty.

And again, are we not overdoing the thing in regard to funerals? I have already shown in these letters that one can hardly afford to die now-a-days, owing to the expense. This expense grows out of the fact that we are letting fashion act as mistress of ceremonies on these occasions. It is not enough that fashion has made asses of us, and tricked us out with her fantastic nonsense all our lives, but, even after the curtain has fallen, the lights are turned off, the audience have gone home, and the house is shut up, fashion still persists in hanging its gewgaws upon the outside walls.

Accordingly, every respectable deceased must be buried in a casket—a pretty casket of the most approved shape, and the costlier the material, the better. The nails must be silver-headed to be au fait, and the handles classic in design and silver beyond suspicion. The inside must correspond with the outside, and, after the late deceased is laid out, it is then eminently proper to smother him or her with flowers, crosses, wreaths, anchors and other emblematic designs. The climax will be capped if the deceased is clad in the latest style of the beau monde, and carries with him or her into the long sleep, the exact cut or style of garment in which death overtook him or her.

I am not inveighing against respect to the dead. I believe that nothing is so appropriate for a dead child as flowers, nothing so typical of beauty and purity, nothing which so becomes the young life, frail as the flowers themselves. I only object to the frivolous, foolish, indecorous displays which fashion compels the survivors to make. If a man has lived through life like a gentleman, let him be buried like a gentleman, without fashion's tricking-out. I submit that when a man or woman has got through with life, he or she has got through with fashion, and that it is the height of folly for friends of the family to allow officious tradesmen the opportunity of displaying their fashionable wares, on an occasion when simplicity and solemnity are most befitting.

Which brings me to another point in considering whether a live man has any rights a dead man is bound to respect. And that point is—Mourning.

On general principles, I claim that we have no right to advertise our griefs to the world by mourning apparel. Of all griefs, those of death should be the most delicate, the most personal. If we must do it at all, I think the Chinese custom of wearing white is the most sensible. Why must we go in sables and obtrude our crape into the blessed light of the sun, and our black sorrow into the eyes of the world, when all is light where our friend has gone?