With some such modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these Proposals of Mr.Middleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; and heartily recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in either sex, who are willing that this perishable part of them should quit the scene of its mortal activities with as handsome circumstances as possible.
Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal, which they may be apt to take at the place whence these Proposals purport to be issued.

From the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_, they may conclude that Mr.Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling a club of this description at his house, may have a sinister end of his own, altogether foreign to the solemn purpose for which the club is pretended to be instituted.

I must set them right by informing them that the issuer of these Proposals is no publican, though he hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals, who, by the device of a Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of human existence together, has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate, that the framers of these _first_ and _last_ receptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt them, and that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, in strict propriety, _go for nothing_: an awful and instructive lesson to human vanity.
Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance, and appear to have been written about the beginning of the last century, I stumbled, among the rest, upon the following short Essay, which the writer calls, "_The Character of an Undertaker_." It is written with some stiffness and peculiarities of style, but some parts of it, I think, not unaptly characterize the profession to which Mr.Middleton has the honor to belong.

The writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining character of _Sable_, in Steele's excellent comedy of _The Funeral_.
CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER.
"He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies, grand marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the body, over which he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment that the breath has taken leave to that of its final commitment to the earth.

His ministry begins where the physician's, the lawyer's, and the divine's end.