The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1887, page 209 by Various Authors
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ce for the purpose, but do not disfigure the scene. This change has given to the ground the harmony and pleasantness of a park. The monuments, too, are remarkable for their variety, moderation, and good taste. There is very little, if any, of that hideous ostentation, that mere expenditure of money, which renders Greenwood so melancholy a place, exciting far more compassion for the folly of the living, than sorrow for the dead who have escaped their society. We would earnestly recommend the managers of other cemeteries not to pass within a hundred miles of Cincinnati without stepping aside to see for themselves how much the beauty of a burial-ground is increased by the mere removal of the fences round the lots. It took the superintendent of Spring Grove several years to induce the proprietors to consent to the removal of costly fences; but one after another they yielded, and each removal exhibited more clearly the propriety of the change, and made converts to the new system. In the same taste he recommends the levelling of the mounds over the graves, and his advice has been generally followed.
It is very pleasant for the rich people of Cincinnati to live in the lovely country over the hill, away from the heat and smoke of the town; but it has its inconveniences also. It is partly because the rich people are so far away that the public entertainments of the city are so low in quality and so unfrequent. We made the tour of the theatres and shows one evening,--glad to escape the gloom and dinginess of the hotel, once the pride of the city, but now its reproach. Surely there is no other city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants that is so miserably provided with the means of public amusement as Cincinnati. At the first theatre we stumbled into, where Mr. Owens was performing in the Bourcicault version of "The Cricket on the Hearth," there was a large audience, composed chiefly of men. It was the very dirtiest theatre we ever saw. The hands of the ticket-taker were not grimy,--they were black