Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Undertaker's Garland
We have often been asked what determined us to write a book about death. It has been pointed out that we were very young and ordinarily in the best of health and that everybody at our age was sup posed to be bursting with life. We were frequently reminded that Sir Thomas Browne had been fifty three when he wrote his Urn Burial and that even Jeremy Taylor was thirty-eight when he published Holy Dying. Indeed, when our purpose became generally known, a certain alarm was manifested, for the belief in the immortality of the soul is still held in some quarters, so that there are still a num ber of people who stand in the utmost terror of death. When we assured the world that we were treating the subject from a merely artistic point of view and that, with the best will in the world, we could give no guarantees of immortality, because we neither of us believed that any God in his senses would be willing to provide eternal life for such feeble Virtues as our own, we were warned that, in dealing thus with death, we were attempting a very dangerous experiment and probably jeopardizing in valuable souls by a wanton act of impiety. Certain individuals high in the Church even wrote us threatening letters.
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