It is really an affecting consideration to think of so many poor people, of the industrious and hard-working class (for none but such would be possessed of such a generous forethought) clubbing their two-pences to save the reproach of a parish funeral.

Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that Angel and Flower kept from the _Angel_ and _Punchbowl_, while, to provide himself a bier, he has curtailed himself of _beer_.

Many a savory morsel has the living body been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a richer state to the worms.

And sure, if the body could understand the actions of the soul, and entertain generous notions of things, it would thank its provident partner, that she had been more solicitous to defend it from dishonors at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good things in the time of its union.
If Caesar were chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a club of Caesars.
Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people, a generous horror of the work-house more than the manner in which pauper funerals are conducted in this metropolis.

The coffin nothing but a few naked planks coarsely put together,--the want of a pall (that decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes from us), the colored coats of the men that are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body,--altogether give the notion of the deceased having been some person of an ill life and conversation, some one who may not claim the entire rites of Christian burial,--one by whom some parts of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him.