[Illustration: FIG. 37.--_Interment in a Church in the first quarter of the 18th Century._--From PICARD'S great work on the Religions of all Nations.]
In Picard, there is a very beautiful engraving by Schley, representing a funeral procession in 1735, entering the church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. It occurs by night, and a number of pages in black velvet walk in it, carrying lighted three-branched silver candlesticks. It seems that until 1775 women in England only attended the funerals of their own sex, and that men in the same manner only followed men to the grave. Possibly as a disinfectant against the plague, at all English funerals a branch of rosemary was handed to all who attended, which they threw into the open grave. This fashion endured, to the writer's knowledge, in Norfolk up to 1856.
The French Revolution cannot be described as an unmitigated blessing--far from it; but it certainly did away with many superstitious practices, and shed a flood of light upon civilisation. Before that event it was the universal custom throughout Europe to bury in churches, a practice which was most detrimental to health. By one of the earliest decrees passed by the Convention of Paris, 1794, intramural interments were abolished, although, to be sure, cemeteries already existed of considerable extent, possibly suggested by those which for ages the Mahometans have used in all the principal cities of Asia and Asiatic Europe. That of Père la Chaise, so called after the confessor of Madame de Maintenon, who founded it, is one of the earliest. With the counter-Reformation, as the movement is called in history, the ceremonial of the Roman Church became, on the Continent, even more elaborate than heretofore, and nothing can be imagined more theatrically splendid than the church decorations on occasions of funerals of eminent personages.
[Illustration: FIG. 38.--_The Cemetery of Père la Chaise, Paris._]
[Illustration: FIG. 39.--_Funeral of the Grand Duke Albert VII., surnamed "the Pious," Archduke of Austria, at Brussels, 11th March, 1622. The coffin, covered with a pall of cloth of gold, is carried under a canopy by the Ambassador of his Catholic Majesty, by the Duke d'Aumale, the Marquis of Baden, and other great nobles, followed by the Archbishop of Patras and two Cardinals. The horse of the deceased is seen led immediately behind, by grooms and officers of the household._--From the exceedingly rare work by FRANCQUART, printed at Antwerp in 1623. (From the collection of Mr. RICHARD DAVEY, and engraved expressly for this publication.)]