MR. GOODWIN'S PROPOSED 1 0EMETERY.
"GIVE me a place to stand on and I will move the world," said Ancnr- MEDES. "Bring me a sheet Of double elephant," says our modern archi- tect, " and I will plan a city "—or a cemetery, a palace, or a church. It is enough for these magicians that they can design their superstructures and draw their plans ; money and ground are secondary affairs. While Waterloo Bridge does not pay the interest of the shares—while the Thames Tunnel is in a state of blockade—while the London University "soars without wings," and the King's College clings for support to the Tax-Office —comes Mr. Goonwisr, with a plan, elevation, and project, asking only the small extent of two hundred acres, and the insignificant outlay of a couple of millions of money—only 400,0001., indeed, to begin with. The design con- sists of a quadrangle of eighty acres, surrounded by a double colonnade with temples at each corner and on either side, traversed at right angles by other colonnades and terraces ; with a restoration of the Parthenon to do duty as a Christian church in the centre, the Propylteum for an entrance, and inter- spersed with imitations of the Arch of Constantine and that of Septimus Severus, the Temples of Diana, Ilissus, the Winds, and those of Vesta at Rome and Tivoli, the choragic monument of Lysicrates, the column of Trajan, &c. &c., connected into one grand design by the said terraces and colonnades, surmounted with rows of sarcophagi as thick as the urns on the front of the Bank, and the spaces within and around laid out as pleasure-gardens : and all for what ?—To cover the catacombs to be exca- vated underneath—catacombs that may contain three hundred and fifty thousand bodies. This is, indeed, to build a palace for Death—to make a temple of the grave—a city of tombs—a metropolis of mausolea. Had Mr. GOODWIN put forth a lithographic print, giving a bird's-eye view of his ideal cemetery, merely as a specimen of his ingenuity, ores a poetical flight, we should have felt disposed to applaud the good taste which led him to avoid 1i. belling the five orders of architecture in a patohwork aggregation of beauties, snaking one huge deformity, as is the approved fashion in building churches.; and we ehould have placed his production in the same folio with the aerial Inventions of Mr. MARTIN and the substantial ones of Mr. SOANE but when he deliberately proposes to cover two hundred acres of fat meadow-land with his architectural fancies, at an expense of a million and a half of money, we begin to ask whether Mr. Goonwisr is himself mad, or takes the public to be so. While the inhabitants of this enormous city, with its hundred arms spreading out on all sides, crowd to its extremities to inhale the breath of heaven, and tremble lest the Parks should be trespassed upon, our archi- tects would cover these lungs of London with architectural tubercles. Our churchyards may be glutted, our vaults be choked with corruption, but do we therefore need a palace for a charnel-house?—Can we not have a Pere la Chaise on Primrose Hill, without a city for a cemetery ? It follows that Mr. Goonwne's grave monopoly must be supplied with all disposable bodies —no rival could be borne near this magnificent throne of the King of Ter- rors ; for unless burials elsewhere be interdicted, the " Grand National Cemetery" must be unfilled, its design unfinished, and Primrose Hill be consecrated to a vast and dreary "folly." The expense to individuals would be fearful—walking funerals would be out of the question, mid a hearse and coach equally so with ninety-nine out of a hundred : how, then, could conveyance be found ? Parish omnibus-hearses, we suppose, where the in ourners should sit in the same conveyance with the deceased, would he provided, and driven with irreverent speed to the receptacle of corruption. The whole plan seems to us absurd ; and among the many uses of the pro- jected establishment, to dream of making any cemetery, either parochial or national, a fashionable lounge or promenade, is the absurdest thing of all.
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