Note 33 — Chapter I · ST. PAUL'S, AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

The active habits of our ancestors enabled them to bear these out-of-door sermons better than their posterity could; yet, as times grew less hardy, they began to have consequences which Bishop Latimer attributed to another cause. "The citizens of Raim," said he, in a sermon preached in Lincolnshire, in the year 1552, "had their burying-place without the city, which, no doubt, is a laudable thing; and I do marvel that London, being so great a city, hath not a burial-place without, for no doubt it is an unwholesome thing to bury within the city, especially at such a time when there be great sickness, and many die together. I think, verily, that many a man taketh his death in Paul's Churchyard, and this I speak of experience; for I myself, when I have been there on some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill-savoured unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after; and I think no less, but it is the occasion of great sickness and disease."—Brayley, vol. ii., p. 315. After all, the Bishop may have been right in attributing the sickness to the cemetery. We have seen frightful probabilities of the same kind in our own time; and nothing can be more sensible than what he says of burial-grounds in cities.