Dickens, Charles

The Funeral of Dickens.
Nothing could have been more appropriate or in better taste that the way in which the funeral of Charles Dickens was yesterday conducted in London. In a simple hearse, "without the usual English trappings," says the dispatch, the remains of the great novelist were carried from the railway station at Charing Cross to Westminister Abbey. How dreadful, how tawdry, how shocking to every rational and refined sentiment of the civilized mind these "usual English trappings" of the usual English funeral are, no reader of the dead writer's novels needs to be reminded. The hearse with its sable plumes, the horses caparisoned in black, the mourners with their huge bands and scarfs, and above all the mutes - the doleful, vulgar, preposterous mutes - these were all a favourite targe of his satire. And this not only because of their absurdity and their hideous incongruity with the sad simplicity of nature's universal ordinance. He lost no opportunity of making these pomps and vanities ridiculous because he knew how sore a burden they often imposed upon all but the wealthier classes of English society; how often the scanty substance of the widow and the orphan was made scantier by the cruel demands of a fictitious decency. It would have been a kind of outrage upon his memory to have buried him with all these morbid and maudlin shows of stimulated and barbaric woe. Nor could any extravagance of ceremonial spectacle have added the slightest real dignity to his obsequies who was borne, escorted by the loving sorrow of a whole nation, to the majestic mausoleum of the nation's noblest dead. It is a curious circumstance, and not unworthy, perhaps, of being noted, that this great writer, so eminently the writer of the people, should have been the first famous English man to be laid at rest in England's stately Valhalla, since its historic glories and its architecural sublimity have for the first time been thrown freely open to the people of England.