"But Junius has a great authority to support him, which, to speak with the Duke of Grafton, 'I accidentally met with this morning in the course of my reading.' It contains an admonition which cannot be repeated too often," &c.
I have not found the phrase "to speak in lutestring" anywhere else; but I think, from a comparison of these two quotations, that it must mean what I have supposed it to mean—to speak as the echo or exact repeater of another man's words. Where can instances be found of the Duke of Grafton's using this expression, which Philo-Junius ridicules?
W. Fraser.
Tor-Mohun.
BURIAL IN UNCONSECRATED PLACES.
(Vol. vi. passim.)
So many interesting notices have been made by your correspondents on the subject of peculiar interments,—skipping about from one part of the country to another, and dropping down from the south into Lincolnshire, as if in search of farther instances,—that I am induced to add to the number of records, by stating the fact as to the late Mr. Dent, of Winterton, whose body, at his particular request, was deposited after his death in his own garden, on the south of the house in Winterton, where he not only lived but died.
Friend Jonathan, as he was familiarly called, was a man of shrewd understanding, and possessing strong common sense; yet, like others, he had his failings, and amongst them the amor nummi was not the least obtrusive. As a very wealthy man he was looked up to by a little aspiring community of Quakers in the neighbourhood; and his own dress, when in a better suit, exhibited an appearance of his connexion with that fraternity.
The Quakers had a small burial-ground at Thealby, in the parish of Burton-upon-Stother, which I some years ago had the curiosity to inspect, but such a forlorn lost place for such a sober and serious purpose I never in my life before looked upon; it is posited at a little distance from the public road entering Thealby from Winterton, where no doubt at one time stood a lot of cottages and crofts, surrounded by common stone walls, made from the flat stone of the neighbourhood. But so small and so neglected was this burial place, that I could compare it to nothing better than an old parish pinfold; it had been so little attended to when I visited it, that the whole area was under a most luxuriant crop of flourishing nettles, six or seven feet high. And as to graves, or the purport of its occupation, we could see nothing; and yet its position was such that with ordinary attention it might have been even a picturesque spot, having three or four large trees overlooking it.