lost all their influence; and I have seen a line extending down a whole street, without deranging a single lounger from his seat, or interrupting for an instant the pleasures of ice-eating and punch-drinking, which generally takes place in the open air.  Whether this passion for bringing into coarse contact, as is often the case, both life and death, the gloomy and the gay, be constitutional or traditional, I know not; but a traveller can scarcely fail of being struck with the prevalence of the feeling and practice amongst southern nations at all periods of their history, and finding in the modern inhabitants of those favoured regions, frequent resemblances to that strange spirit of melancholy voluptuousness, which travelled onward from Egypt to Greece, and from Greece, together with the other refinements of her philosophy, into the greater part of Italy.  On reaching the church, unless the wealth and situation of the departed can permit the consolation or the vanity of a high mass, the body is immediately committed to the tomb.  Such at least is the practice at Rome; and there are few who have not witnessed with disgust the indecent haste of the few attendants by whom this portion of the last rites is usually despatched.  In the country, and in smaller towns, the corpse is usually exposed for at least a day:  I know few exceptions, from Trent to Naples.  It is generally an affecting ceremony.  One of the most touching instances of the kind I can remember, was the exposure of a young girl, who had just died in the flush of beauty in a small village in Tuscany.  I was passing through at the time, and stepped by chance into the church.  The corpse was lying on a low bier before the altar; a small lamp burnt above.  Her two younger sisters were kneeling at her side, and from time to time cast flowers upon her head.  Scarcely a peasant entered but immediately came up and touched the bier, and, after kneeling for a few moments, rose and murmured a prayer or two for the spiritual rest of the departed.  All this was done very naturally, and with a kindliness which spoke highly for the warmth and purity of their affections.  A similar custom still continues at Rome.  The day after the execution of the conspirator Targioni, who suffered in the late affair of the Prince Spada, flowers and chaplets, notwithstanding every precaution on the part of the police, were found scattered on his tomb.  He has been refused, for his contumacy in his last moments, Christian sepulture, and was buried in a field outside the Porta del Popolo.  It is remarkable that, very nearly in the same place, the freedmen of Nero paid a similar tribute of affection to the mortal remains of their master.  Garlands and flowers, the morning after his death, were also found upon his tomb.

New Monthly Magazine.

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SLAVERY IN THE EAST.