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HAS a live man any rights which a dead man is bound to respect?

I ask this question with due consideration for the feelings of a dead man. I know it is an unpleasant thing to be a dead man. There are no corner-lots, no operas, no new novels, no latest styles, no duck-shooting, no sensations on the other bank of the Styx.

I never appreciated that poet who would not live always. I would.

Neither that other poet who wanted to die in the summer time. I am so little particular about the time, as to prefer not to die at any time.

Neither those gushing young women who pine for a willow tree, with a nightingale "into it," at the headboard, and trim daisies at the foot-board.

My sepulchro-botanical yearnings are overpowered by a very strong friendship for this superb old world.

Which reminds me to again ask the question: Has a live man any rights which a dead man is bound to respect?

And this suggests, first, Tombstones.

I am prepared to make a wager with any responsible party that in a match for the championship of lying, a tombstone would beat Ananias with Sapphira thrown in, and will give odds. Hic jacet is literally true, and about the only true thing the majority of tombstones say. If the ghosts of the late deceased—who are always eminent—are permitted to stroll about cemeteries at their leisure, their astonishment at reading their epitaphs must be of the most supernatural character.

A miser, whose small soul in his earthly life could not have been found with a microscope, is astonished to discover, that he was a liberal-hearted man and a benefactor, with distant allusions to the possibility of his having been an angel in disguise.

A man who went through the world without the responsibility of a single moral principle under his vest, suddenly finds that he was possessed of all the cardinal virtues, and is written down on cool marble as an exemplar for the rising generation.

A woman who, in the earthly tabernacle, was the lingual scourge of her neighborhood, discovers that she was the loveliest of her sex, and is now an angel with the handsomest wings to be found in the whole ornithological tribe of the upper air.

A man whose highest ambition was to go through life quietly, doing as much good as he could for his fellows, and to go out of life like a gentleman, finds himself kicking up posthumous dust under a huge monument of the most elaborate description, gaudy with gilding, wreaths, chaplets, urns, torches and flowers.

Considering the number of nuisances among the living, the quantity of angels and cherubs in every graveyard is appalling, and it becomes a question worthy of consideration by the Academy of Sciences—the ultimate destination of the sinners and poor devils. All known grave yards are devoted exclusively to saints. In what ignota terra rest the bones of the sinners?

Now, I submit that a live man has some rights which a tombstone is bound to respect, and that when old Sniffles, who swindled me unmercifully, the other day, without any compunction, shuffles off his miserable coil, his tombstone shall not tell me he was a pink of honesty.

And again, are we not overdoing the thing in regard to funerals? I have already shown in these letters that one can hardly afford to die now-a-days, owing to the expense. This expense grows out of the fact that we are letting fashion act as mistress of ceremonies on these occasions. It is not enough that fashion has made asses of us, and tricked us out with her fantastic nonsense all our lives, but, even after the curtain has fallen, the lights are turned off, the audience have gone home, and the house is shut up, fashion still persists in hanging its gewgaws upon the outside walls.

Accordingly, every respectable deceased must be buried in a casket—a pretty casket of the most approved shape, and the costlier the material, the better. The nails must be silver-headed to be au fait, and the handles classic in design and silver beyond suspicion. The inside must correspond with the outside, and, after the late deceased is laid out, it is then eminently proper to smother him or her with flowers, crosses, wreaths, anchors and other emblematic designs. The climax will be capped if the deceased is clad in the latest style of the beau monde, and carries with him or her into the long sleep, the exact cut or style of garment in which death overtook him or her.

I am not inveighing against respect to the dead. I believe that nothing is so appropriate for a dead child as flowers, nothing so typical of beauty and purity, nothing which so becomes the young life, frail as the flowers themselves. I only object to the frivolous, foolish, indecorous displays which fashion compels the survivors to make. If a man has lived through life like a gentleman, let him be buried like a gentleman, without fashion's tricking-out. I submit that when a man or woman has got through with life, he or she has got through with fashion, and that it is the height of folly for friends of the family to allow officious tradesmen the opportunity of displaying their fashionable wares, on an occasion when simplicity and solemnity are most befitting.

Which brings me to another point in considering whether a live man has any rights a dead man is bound to respect. And that point is—Mourning.

On general principles, I claim that we have no right to advertise our griefs to the world by mourning apparel. Of all griefs, those of death should be the most delicate, the most personal. If we must do it at all, I think the Chinese custom of wearing white is the most sensible. Why must we go in sables and obtrude our crape into the blessed light of the sun, and our black sorrow into the eyes of the world, when all is light where our friend has gone?

But this custom could be endured if fashion had not seized it. Fashion regulates our sorrow, measures our grief, and bounds our mourning within prescribed limits. Heartfelt grief goes in deep black. Good average grief in half black. Mitigated grief contents itself in a black-bordered handkerchief, and advertises itself to correspondents in a black-bordered envelope. Hopeful grief will get along with a jet pin, and for just the smallest amount of grief in the world, a dark figure in the dress, and a week's abstinence from the opera will do; while for the tribe of relatives whom you never saw and never wanted to see, any milliner or tailor can regulate your grief with a yardstick or hat-body.

If I were a blessed, viewless spirit, and found a friend of mine indulging in mitigated grief for me with handkerchief edging, I would indulge in spiritual manifestations which would put the Fox sisters to their trumps.

In the name of our common humanity, do we not play pranks enough with the living to let the dead rest? Why vex their memories with the foolery of fashion? Why make ourselves walking sign-boards, announcing to the world, that does not care a whit about it, that we are in this or that stage of grief?

With our fashionable mourning, we are putting a libel on immortality, and lowering to the vulgar level of common notoriety what should be most sacred and strictly private.

And now I suppose that, in answer to all this, somebody will fling at me that stupid old apothegm—De mortuis nil nisi bonum. It is time that maxim was exploded, or, at least, dissected, so that it may have proper application. A, who has been a rascal all his life, dies, and immediately we are all so tender of his reputation that we very nearly canonize him. As soon as a man dies, it is the universal outcry to let him rest. I do not see the slightest danger of disturbing his rest by anything we can say or do. He will probably lie quite as still as if we are silent. It is not probable that he will grow indignant if we tell the exact truth about him, or exhibit any large amount of gratification over our eulogies. In this upper world it is quite a common thing for us to assail our dear friends as soon as their coat-tails are over our thresholds, when this backbiting may be cruelly unjust, and there are some of us who require a very light stock of material to do a thriving business in slander. We pursue our friends with defamation while living, and while it will injure them, but when dead and past all injury, we grow suddenly reticent and commence the rather ungracious task of eulogy, and we usually outdo ourselves in the latter direction. Let equal justice be done. Hold up the dead man's virtues to emulation, and his vices to abhorrence. He is quite beyond any harm we can do him, and if we have any tenderness to bestow on reputation, let us bestow it on the living.

October 26, 1867.