an unpurchased 'common grave' (only a nineteen-shilling fee paid), it was doubtless—to adopt the official euphuism for the basest sacrilege—'used again,' after the lapse of some fifteen years say: as must also have been the graves of those dear to him. For such had, of late years, become the uniform practice in regard to 'common graves,' the present custodian tells me, amid other melancholy detail of those good old times, which mortal sexton cannot but remember wistfully,—of some sixteen hundred burials in the year; until, in fact, the 'hallowed enclosure' and 'resting-place' was closed by authority in 1854. In 1827, indeed, the over-crowding had not reached its subsequent portentous dimensions. But only a few years later, viz. in 1831—32, when resurrection work was so active, a nightly guard of two watchmen had to be set on foot, and was continued till the closing of the ground. Their watch-box still lingered at the period of my visit in 1854.
To a neglected life, then. Consistently followed a nameless and dishonoured grave. 'The Campo Santo of the Dissenters' these fields have been poetically styled.. A truly British Campo Santo; bare of art, beauty, or symbol of human feeling: the very gravestones of old Nonconformist worthies now huddled into a corner, as by-past rubbish. Wandering lonely around that drear, sordid Golgotha, the continuous rumble of near omnibus traffic forming a running accompaniment of dismal sound, in harmony with the ugliness which oppresses the eye: wandering dejected in that squalid Hades, it is, for the time, hard to realize the spiritual message, in song and design, of the poet whose remains lie, or once lay there.
The year of Blake's death has been incorrectly given by Allan Cunningham as 1828; so, too, by Pilkington and the other dictionaries, and in Knight's Cyclopædia, all copying one another. In the Literary Gazette and in the Gentleman's Magazine appeared, at the time, brief notices of Blake, in substance the same. The year of Blake's death, it may be worth adding, was that of Beethoven's and of Jean Paul Richter's.
