Finis Coronat Opus
The Burial Places of Europe
According to the XII Tables (the earliest code of Roman Law), burial within the walls of ancient Rome was strictly prohibited, though the Senate reserved the right, in rare instances, to make exception as a mark of special honor. Many of the Roman families preferred cremation, while others adhered to the custom of unburnt burial. To accommodate the former, large chambers, filled with niches or recesses, called Columbaria, were provided, as receptacles for the vases containing the ashes left after burning. For the latter, the sarcophagus, the mausoleum, the catacomb, the excavation in the tufa rock, furnished the usual sepulture. These burial places lined the roads leading out of Rome, and many of them still remain along the Appian Way. The frontage of the principal roads became so valuable for burial purposes that it was customary to add after the inscription of names and dates on the monuments a record of the number of feet in the front and depth of every lot. The most ancient of the Roman burial places still in existence is the tomb of the Scipios, in the fork between the Via Appia and the Via Latina, and the most magnificent mausoleum was that of Hadrian, which was lined throughout with Parian marble, and surrounded by rows of statues between columns of variegated Oriental marbles. Its chambers were rifled by the Goths under Alaric; it was afterwards converted into a fortress by Belisarius; and for centuries it has been known as the Castle of S. Angelo.
The Campo Santo of Pisa is the prototype of the covered or cloistered cemetery, having been constructed in the thirteenth century. The vast rectangle within this singular structure is surrounded by arcades of white marble, and within their enclosed spaces the walls are covered with historic paintings by famous Tuscan artists. Aside from its strange-looking sarcophagi, its antique devices, and its curious inscriptions, there are two objects of more than passing interest. The earth, to the depth of several feet, was brought from Palestine, not so much from sentimental considerations, as because, of supposed antiseptic and rapidly decomposing properties. The other, hanging on the west wall, is the enormous blockading chain that was used in the harbor of Pisa. It was captured by the Genoese forces in 1362, and restored to Pisa in 1848.
The southern cemetery of Munich, just outside the Sendling Gate, is another cloistered rectangular structure, or campo santo, less attractive historically than that of Pisa, being quite modern, but in point of decorative art, inasmuch as Munich is one of the favored centres of the fine arts, infinitely superior. It is a museum of tombs, most of whose occupants were wealthy enough to obtain from the best sculpture of the day “a bond in stone and everduring bronze” to perpetuate their memories. In the Leichenhaus (dead house) adjoining may be seen through glass windows the bodies which are customarily deposited there for three days before burial. They are placed in their coffins in easy and natural postures, they are arrayed as usual in life, and flowers and other accessories are so arranged as to make them appear as if asleep. There is a similar Leichenhaus in Frankfort, and the primary object is the same in both, to obviate the danger of premature interment. On one of the fingers of each corpse is placed a ring attached to a light cord connected with a bell in the room of the warder, who is always on the watch.
Among the various modes of burial on the continent, none are so revolting to an Englishman or an American as the use of a common fosse, or pit. In one of the cemeteries of Naples is a series of 365 pits, one for every day of the year. One pit is opened each day, the dead of that day are laid in it, and it is filled with earth containing a large quantity of lime. A year afterwards this earth with its decomposed contents is removed, and the pit placed in readiness for the annual repetition of the burial of new bodies with fresh earth and fresh lime.
In the basement of the Capuchin Church in Rome is the charnel-house or cemetery of the Friars. It is divided into recesses, and the walls are festooned with the bones of disinterred Capuchins, arranged in fanciful forms, such as stars, crosses, crowns, shields, lamps, etc. The arrangement of the bones is ingenious, and more grotesque than horrible. Here and there, in niches, entire skeletons are placed in various attitudes. At the death of a friar the body is deposited in the oldest grave, and the bones of the former occupant are removed to the ossuarium, and prepared for the additional decoration of the vaults. In the Church of St. Ursula, in Cologne, are preserved the bones of eleven thousand virgins—more or less—who were barbarously massacred by the Huns because they refused to break the vows of chastity. These osseous relics are piled on shelves built in the walls for their accommodation and display. It is hard for an American, whether churchman or heretic, to comprehend the meaning or purpose or taste of such a strange anatomical exhibition.
There are Americans who go to Nuremberg without visiting the Johannisfriedhof, the church-yard of St. John. They miss many things worth seeing in this extremely quaint spot,—monumental designs, intricate iron work, bronze tablets on horizontal stones, which have no parallels or imitations elsewhere. They miss the “Emigravit,” etc. inscribed on the tombstone of Albert Dürer, and referred to by Mr. Longfellow in his lines descriptive of Nuremberg; they miss the strange monument to Hans Sachs; and they miss the mortuary chapel of the Holzschuher family which contains some of the finest works of the old sculptor, Adam Krafft. But people have differing tastes, and those of our countrymen referred to as not caring a fig for the queer bronze bas-reliefs in the church-yard of St. John, make it a point to include the catacombs of Rome and Paris within the range of their visits in these cities. In Paris it is much easier to trace the course of the catacombs on charts, to learn above ground the history of the transformation of the old quarries into subterranean charnel-houses, and to accept the statistical statement that three millions of skeletons are deposited there, without verifying the assertion by descending into the excavations and counting the bones. Faithfully “doing” the crypts of the churches in Paris, as elsewhere, is fatiguing enough. It is well to stand by the coffin of Victor Hugo in the lower recesses of the Pantheon, or on the spot in the Chapelle Expiatoire, where Marie Antoinette was originally buried, or near the ashes of the celebrities in the undercroft of St. Denis, but fatigue eventually draws the line.
There is one crypt of which no one ever tires, no matter how frequent the visits may be repeated. It is directly beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides, and holds the porphyry monolith in which repose the remains of Napoleon. Around the top of the portico is a circular marble balustrade over which the visitor looks down at the colossal bronze caryatides and marble statues which surround the tomb. The height of the dome is 323 feet. Through an ingenious arrangement of an upper window a flood of golden light is made to strike the high altar near the tomb in a singularly effective manner. As one glances from that altar to the magnificent frescoes around, from the splendid statuary to the glories of the torn and faded battle flags, from the mosaic laurels on the floor of the crypt to the grandeur of the dome, he feels that this is art’s supreme effort to make the resting place of the warrior at once the most beautiful and the most majestic tomb that has ever been reared to a mortal.
What a broad contrast between this imperial magnificence and the simple and quiet grave of Thomas Gray in the church-yard of Stoke Pogis, the scene of his immortal Elegy; or the ivy-covered tomb of Walter Scott in a sheltered nook of the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey; or the vault in the chancel of the parish church on the bank of the Avon, at Stratford, which holds the ashes of William Shakespeare. Visitors to Naples hesitate to climb the steep rocks near the Grotto of Posilipo, to visit the alleged tomb of Virgil, because authoritative writers doubt whether the author of the Æneid was buried there. But we know that in that quiet spot at the southeast corner of the venerable church of Stoke manor, Gray was buried, and we are told that on the evening before the capture of Quebec and the overthrow of the French dominion in Canada, General Wolfe said, “I would rather be the author of the Elegy in a Country Church-yard than to win a victory to-morrow.” And we might ask, who would not rather be the author of Hamlet than the victor of Austerlitz or Marengo?
“Such graves as theirs are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined;
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.”
What Santa Croce is to Italy, what the Valhalla is to Germany, what the Pantheon was intended to be to France—the shrine of genius—Westminster Abbey is to England. Scores of kings and queens are buried in this National Sanctuary, but though it is still the place for the coronation, it is no longer the place for the interment of royalty. It has become the sepulchre of the kings of great thought and of grand action. Says Dean Stanley in his Historical Memorials of the Abbey, “As the Council of the nation and the Courts of Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very Throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the Kings and surrounded them as with a guard of honor after their death.... Let those who are inclined to contrast the placid dignity of our recumbent Kings with Chatham gesticulating from the Northern Transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakespeare leaning on his column in Poets’ Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the Chapel of St. John, look upon them as in their different ways keeping guard over the shrine of our monarchy and our laws.”
The Abbey does not monopolize the ashes of England’s greatest dead. Many who were illustrious in arms, in arts, in song, in statesmanship, rest in another Valhalla, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Notwithstanding the passionate exclamation of Nelson, “A peerage, or Westminster Abbey,” he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and so, half a century later, was Wellington. But a mile to the eastward there is a burial place of far more curious interest to the student of English history. It is in the grounds of that gloomy aggregation of buildings, the Tower of London, the fortress, prison, and palace, which dates back to the Norman Conquest. In point of historic reminiscence there is not a more interesting, certainly not a sadder spot than the Chapel of St. Peter in the Tower. Here rest the distinguished victims of the remorseless axe,—Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, Essex, Somerset, Northumberland, and all the rest of noble martyrs who were beheaded near the Beauchamp Tower, a few yards from where their remains have mouldered to dust. Macaulay says of this burial place: “Death is there associated, not as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and church-yards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”