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Updated: July 25, 2025
"It will be a very short time now." It was even shorter than they thought. The snow, falling then, had not disappeared from the earth when the picks of the grave-diggers cleft through the clods in the secluded little mountain burying-ground.
Night is the time when all three, hemp-beaters, grave-diggers, and ghosts, principally exercise their callings. At night, too, the hemp-beater tells his harrowing tales. May I be pardoned for a slight digression.
The body was carried downstairs by the grave-diggers without any opposition being offered, but hardly had they advanced ten yards into the square when shouts of "To the Rhone! to the Rhone!" resounded on all sides. A police officer who tried to interfere was knocked down, the bearers were ordered to turn round; they obeyed, and the crowd carried them off towards the wooden bridge.
By the smoky flames of torches, which threw a red glare upon the dark fir-trees, and the white tombstones, many grave-diggers worked merrily, humming snatches of some favorite tune. Their laborious and hazardous industry then commanded a very high price; they were in such request that it was necessary to humor them.
It was the plague. Its poisonous breath penetrated into cottages and palaces, extinguishing the lives of many thousands. The grave-diggers marked innumerable houses with a black cross, to warn the passers-by that the destroying angel had entered there. The roll of the dead rose to such numbers that it was impossible to bury them all in the customary manner.
He has under him keepers, gardeners, grave-diggers, and their assistants. He is a personage. Mourning hearts do not speak to him at first. He does not appear at all except in serious cases, such as one corpse mistaken for another, a murdered body, an exhumation, a dead man coming to life.
One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it has been urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of low characters and comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, who had just assisted at the Stratford Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, was induced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to omit the grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet.
The jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet.
"What shall we do for coffins?" one of the grave-diggers asks, as he smooths over the edges of the grave. "Give them soldiers' burial," suggests one of the bystanders. "Here, take my shawl," says a shivering woman, as she pulls a thin faded gray shawl from her shoulders. Her suggestion is followed by a score of other trembling wretches.
The grave-diggers in Hamlet have no chance, when such a piece as the Guèbres is written agreeably to all rules and unities. Adieu, my dear Sir! I hope to find you quite well at my return. Yours ever. Dumenil, as has been mentioned in a former note, was the most popular of the French tragic actresses at this time, as Mrs. PARIS, Sunday night, Sept. 17, 1769.
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