[32] London and Middlesex, vol. ii., p. 231.
[33] The active habits of our ancestors enabled them to bear these out-of-door sermons better than their posterity could; yet, as times grew less hardy, they began to have consequences which Bishop Latimer attributed to another cause. "The citizens of Raim," said he, in a sermon preached in Lincolnshire, in the year 1552, "had their burying-place without the city, which, no doubt, is a laudable thing; and I do marvel that London, being so great a city, hath not a burial-place without, for no doubt it is an unwholesome thing to bury within the city, especially at such a time when there be great sickness, and many die together. I think, verily, that many a man taketh his death in Paul's Churchyard, and this I speak of experience; for I myself, when I have been there on some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill-savoured unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after; and I think no less, but it is the occasion of great sickness and disease."—Brayley, vol. ii., p. 315. After all, the Bishop may have been right in attributing the sickness to the cemetery. We have seen frightful probabilities of the same kind in our own time; and nothing can be more sensible than what he says of burial-grounds in cities.
[34] Maitland, vol. ii., p. 949.
[35] The reader, perhaps, will agree with us in thinking, that the last three lines of this poetry are unworthy of the rest, and put Jane in a theatrical attitude which she would not have effected.
[36] Some account of London, third edition, p. 394.
[37] Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv., p. 91.
[38] "After which, once ended," says Stow, "the preacher gat him home, and never after durst look out for shame, but kept him out of sight like an owle; and when he once asked one that had been his olde friende, what the people talked of him, all were it that his own conscience well shewed him that they talked no good, yet when the other answered him, that there was in every man's mouth spoken of him much shame, it so strake him to the hart, that in a few daies after, he withered, and consumed away."—Brayley, vol. i., p. 312.
[39] From a MS. in the British Museum, quoted by Brayley, vol. ii., p. 312.
[40] A Dance of Death (for the subject was often repeated) is a procession of the various ranks of life, from the pope to the peasant, each led by a skeleton for his partner. Holbein enlarged it by the addition of a series of visits privately paid by Death to the individuals. The figurantes, in his work, by no means go down the dance "with an air of despondency." The human beings are unconscious of their partners (which is fine); and the Deaths are as jolly as skeletons well can be.
[41] Brayley, vol. ii., p. 320.