Three or four summers ago I buried an Irish reaper, who had suddenly died in the harvest-fields. About half a dozen fellow-labourers, Irish and Roman Catholics like himself, bore him to the grave. At the words earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, they threw in handfuls of soil; and, as soon as the service was over, they filled up the grave with spades which they had brought for the purpose. No doubt, there was religious prejudice in all this; but their behaviour was most reverent, and what they did seemed to arise from the generous instinct to cover the dead body of a comrade.
ALFRED GATTY.
Wheatly on the Common Prayer (ch. xii. §5.) derives this custom from the ancients, and adds that—
"In the Greek Church, the casting earth upon the body has been accounted so essential to the solemnity, that it is ordered to be done by the priest himself. And the same was enjoined by our own rubric in the first Common Prayer of King Edward VI."
For the Greek Church Wheatly refers to Goar Rituale Græcorum, p. 538. The passage, which I transcribe from Goar, runs as follows:—
"Et cadaver in monumento deponitur. Sacerdos vero terram batillo tollens superinjecit cadaveri, dicens, 'Domini est terra et plenitudo ejus: orbis terrarum et qui habitant in eo.' His peractis cadaveri superinfundunt lampadis oleum, aut e thuribulo cinerem. Atque ita ut moris est, sepulchrum operiunt dum dicuntur moduli," &c.
The following reference may also be added, Goar, 556., "Officium funeris monachorum," where the earth is directed to be thrown "in crucis modum."
N. E. R. (a Subscriber.)
ON THE WORD "PRENZIE" IN "MEASURE FOR MEASURE."
(Vol. iii., p. 401.)
"The first folio," says Dr. Johnson, "has in both places prenzie, from which the other folios made princely, and every editor may make what he can." It will not be difficult, I conceive, to find out what sense Shakspeare meant to convey by this word, and to show that what he meant he has expressed with sufficient accuracy, though his meaning was soon after misunderstood. Our language owes much of its wealth of words to the talent which our great poet possessed for coining them—a talent which he exercised with marvelous tact: and if now and then some of them failed for want of being properly printed, we may rather wonder that so many obtained currency, than that a few ceased to circulate soon after they were first introduced.