“If I do die before thee, pr’thee, shroud me
In one of those same sheets”
—a wish, indeed, which her cruel fate so speedily caused to be realized. And in “3 Henry VI.” (i. 1) we have King Henry’s powerful words:
“Think’st thou, that I will leave my kingly throne,
Wherein my grandsire and my father sat?
No: first shall war unpeople this my realm;
Ay, and their colours,—often borne in France,
And now in England, to our heart’s great sorrow,—
Shall be my winding-sheet.”
The custom, still prevalent, of carrying the dead to the grave with music—a practice which existed in the primitive church—to denote that they have ended their spiritual warfare, and are become conquerors, formerly existed very generally in this country.[747] In “Cymbeline” (iv. 2), Arviragus says:
“And let us, Polydore, though now our voices
Have got the mannish crack, sing him to the ground,
As once our mother; use like note and words,
Save that Euriphile must be Fidele.”
The tolling of bells at funerals is referred to in “Hamlet” (v. 1), where the priest says of Ophelia:
“she is allow’d her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.”
It has been a current opinion for centuries that places of burial are haunted with spectres and apparitions—a notion, indeed, that prevailed as far back as the times of heathenism. Ovid speaks of ghosts coming out of their sepulchres and wandering about: and Vergil, quoting the popular opinion of his time, tells us how Moeris could call the ghosts out of their sepulchres (“Bucol.” viii. 98):
“Moerim, sæpe animas imis excire sepulchris,
Atque satas alio vidi traducere messis.”
Indeed, the idea of the ghost remaining near the corpse is of world-wide prevalence; and as Mr. Tylor[748] points out, “through all the changes of religious thought from first to last, in the course of human history, the hovering ghosts of the dead make the midnight burial-ground a place where men’s flesh creeps with terror.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Puck declares: