Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/128

Rh perpetrators of the crime. For a moment I thought he might actually spring upon the excrescence and tear out the hateful thing with his bare fists. Meanwhile the scandalised onlookers, believing they were witnessing the distraction of some unfortunate fellow creature bereft of his reason, resumed their way, remarking compassionately about him to one another.

The banging of the heavy studded doors of the porch by the sexton, closing the Cathedral until the evening service, arrested his invective. Anxious to divert his attention from the desecrating tablet, I remarked that we should not now gain admission into the interior of the Cathedral. 'Damn the interior of the Cathedral!' he shouted. 'I've seen enough of the depredations of your Cathedral blockheads. Catch me putting my nose into another mess of restoration botchery.'

Quitting the Cathedral ground, we turned towards the Necropolis, an eminence now converted into a public cemetery, which commands a wide view over the city.

Glancing up at the huge mound speckled with glittering white tombstones and monuments, he remarked on the circumstance that Christian communities had failed to make tolerable architectural features of their burial places, even when, as in Glasgow and so many other towns, the most prominent and attractive situation had been appropriated for burying grounds. In Italy, where they had the tradition of the catacombs and the pantheons, some attempt had been made to give architectural importance to burial places, particularly such as were preserves for the interment of rich and illustrious persons. But, generally speaking, he said, cemeteries were amongst the most incongruous and positively unsightly creations of civilised man. The only burial places that showed even decency of public taste were some of the old churchyards, where simple stone tablets or slabs had been made of the same kind of stone as the adjoining church, which became veiled in a kindly way by the grass or yew bushes. Yet it was surely possible to devise some sort of