SKELETONS

Evening Star, Issue 19020, 15 August 1925, Page 2

SKELETONS

SOiE RECENT RESURRECTION _ In the Abbey of Neuraoustier, at Huy, which is now a garden, some workmen, digging up the cloisters, hare uncovered the skeleton of Peter the Hermit, who has been credited, uot too truthfully, with inspiring the first crusades. Riding his sacred asa and exhorting the manhood of Picardy to rescue poor palmers at Jerusalem from the insults of the Turk, Peter was bolder in word than be showed himself in deed. The severities of the siege of Antioch cooled his fervor, and, quitting the city by stonltb, he fled home—to Quote Guihsrt of Nogent—like “ a fallen star.”

Still the question does arise whether even Peter the Hermit, coward though he was, might not now’ be permitted to rest in peace. Have we really a right to turn the dead in their graves? Against the unveiling of King_ Tutankhamen it is said that King George himself has protested—and with reason. Monarcns never know. Revolution sometimes anticipates their lesurrection, and only this year the Bead of Henri Quatre, preserved in glass, was sold by auction for 100 francs, it is true that some of his hair Pad been used by Jacobins for false moustaches, but the price suggested that m Paris, at any rate, royalty is at a discount. Possibly, London offers a better inaiket for relics. The vest which King O.arles the Martyr wore on the scaffold recently fetched 250 gs. And, unlike the franc, the guineas stood at par. Rightly does Shakespeare refer to England as “ this teemping Womb of royal kings.” You never know where your spade may uplift some majestic ankle. In the Abbey Church of Sherborne there are buried no fewer than two kings, Ethel bald and Ethelbert, brothers of Alfred the Great; and last month Ethelbert again saw the light of day. And not long ago the skeleton of King Richard HI. was found in the Abbey of the Gray Friars at Leicester and deposited in the town museum. Proud mouarchs do not like to think of immortality as a glass_ case. They do not admit that to their fame there can ever be a statute of limitations. It is true that the crook-backed Richard was accused of murdering King Henry VI,; also his brother, the Luke of Clarence, who was . drowned inadvertently in a butt of malmsey ale; and, finally, the little princes in the Tower, King Edward V. and the Duke of York. But is the town museum at Leicester quite the place iu which honor should be paid to an anointed sovereign? After all, the little princes, when discovered in a staircase of the Tower, were replaced in Westminstei Abbey. May not an affectionate unck join them? The sad case of Peter the Hermit shows that saints are no more immunn from a premature resurrection than sovereigns. The latest case affects St Cuthbert of Durham. Tradition says that he is buried behind the high altar of the Cathedral, but in ‘ Marmion ’ Sir Walter Scott tells us that, according to Catholic tradition, the Benedictines exhumed their patron and buried him elsewhere in the church, the precise spot being known to three monks of the order only at any given time. Dean Welldon, of Durham, therefore, has challenged the Benedictines to disclose their secret before a jury representing the Roman and Anglican faiths. He win then pennit-ilie -iiMfcoim to tffit the alleged sepulchre with their pickaxes. As St. Cuthbert was buried at Melrose and several other places before he reached Durham, it must be confessed that his posthumous career has been somewhat peripatetic.^ With heretics the trouble is that sometimes they are not buried at all. It is true that Darwins sleep with kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, but that was because, despite evolution, he was a good husband and excellent father! But Lenin is condemned to a perpetual lying-in-statc. And even Voltaire is but imperfectly interred in the Pantheon. For when, one day last vear, they dusted his bust hi the Bibliothequo"National, they discovered at its back a silver plate, engraved with the words, “ Coeur de Voltaire,” behind which was a wooden box. In the box was a golden heart which, when shaken, was found to contain liquid! Voltaire’s heart was thus preserved in spirits. To some among the illustrious these post mortem vicissitudes will suggest arguments for cremation. Bishop Gore lias boldly asserted that this rite transgresses no theological dogma, and he states further that the opposition of the Roman Church is based, not on grounds of faith, but of custom only. No one who has visited the catacombs of Paris, packed as they are with grimly-arranged hones taken from the various cemeteries of the city, will feel that respect for the anatomy of an ancestor survives many centuries of social change. After all, it is the soul in man that matters. And it was only the English public school boy who, inspired by Nordic intellectuality, translated De mortuis, nil nisi bonum into the words, “Among the dead, there is nothing but bone.”—New York Outlook.’