Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carion. Pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes."[238:A]
After the funeral was over, it was customary, among all ranks, to give a cold, and sometimes a very ostentatious, entertainment to the mourners. To this usage Shakspeare refers, in the character of Hamlet:
"Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,"
a passage which Mr. Collins has illustrated by the following quotation from a contemporary writer: "His corpes was with funerall pompe conveyed to the church, and there sollemnly enterred, nothing omitted which necessitie or custom could claime; a sermon, a banquet, and like observations."[238:B]
The funeral feast is not yet extinct; it may occasionally be met with in places remote from the metropolis, and more particularly in the northern counties among some of the wealthy yeomanry. Mr. Douce considers the practice as "certainly borrowed from the cœna feralis of the Romans," and adds, "in the North this feast is called an arval or arvil supper; and the loaves that are sometimes distributed among the poor, arval-bread. Not many years since one of these arvals was celebrated in a village in Yorkshire at a public-house, the sign of which was the family arms of a nobleman whose motto is Virtus post funera vivit. The undertaker, who, though a clerk, was no scholar, requested a gentleman present to explain to
him the meaning of these Latin words, which he readily and facetiously did in the following manner; Virtus, a parish clerk, vivit, lives well, post funera, at an arval. The latter word is apparently derived from some lost Teutonic term that indicated a funeral pile on which the body was burned in times of Paganism."[239:A]