It is remarkable that, excepting only the pew belonging to Rydal Hall, that to Rydal Mount, the one to the parsonage, and, I believe, another, the men and women still continue, as used to be the custom in Wales, to sit separate from each other.

Is this practice as old as the Reformation?
and when and how did it originate?
In the Jewish synagogues, and in Lady Huntingdon's chapels, the sexes are divided in the same way.

In the adjoining churchyard greater changes have taken place; it is now not a little crowded with tombstones; and near the schoolhouse, which stands in the churchyard, is an ugly structure, built to receive the hearse, which is recently come into use.
It would not be worth while to allude to this building, or the hearse-vehicle it contains, but that the latter has been the means of introducing a change much to be lamented in the mode of conducting funerals among the mountains.

Now, the coffin is lodged in the hearse at the door of the house of the deceased, and the corpse is so conveyed to the churchyard gate.

All the solemnity which formerly attended its progress, as described in this poem, is put an end to.