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cannot know this till his death has actually taken place, and it will be
too late then for him to discover that he was going to die at the
appointed hour after all. The Erewhonians, therefore, hold that death,
like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.

They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over any
piece of ground which the deceased may himself have chosen. No one is
permitted to refuse this hospitality to the dead: people, therefore,
generally choose some garden or orchard which they may have known and
been fond of when they were young. The superstitious hold that those
whose ashes are scattered over any land become its jealous guardians from
that time forward; and the living like to think that they shall become
identified with this or that locality where they have once been happy.

They do not put up monuments, nor write epitaphs, for their dead, though
in former ages their practice was much as ours, but they have a custom
which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the
name alive after the death of the body seems to be common to all mankind.
They have statues of themselves made while they are still alive (those,
that is, who can afford it), and write inscriptions under them, which are
often quite as untruthful as are our own epitaphs--only in another way.
For they do not hesitate to describe themselves as victims to ill temper,
jealousy, covetousness, and the like, but almost always lay claim to
personal beauty, whether they have it or not, and, often, to the
possession of a large sum in the funded debt of the country. If a person
is ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears
his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one
of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for
such a statue. Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural
disinclination to admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect
to be idealised. I understood that the multitude of these statues was
beginning to be felt as an encumbrance in almost every family, and that
the custom would probably before long fall into desuetude.

Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every one, as
regards the statues of public men--not more than three of which can be
found in the whole capital. I expressed my surprise at this, and was
told that some five hundred years before my visit, the city had been so
overrun with these pests, that there was no getting about, and people
were worried beyond endurance by having their attention called at every
touch and turn to something, which, when they had attended to it, they
found not to concern them. Most of these statues were mere attempts to
do for some man or woman what an animal-stuffer does more successfully
for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were generally foisted on the public
by some coterie that was trying to exalt itself in exalting some one

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