And
this for the sufficient reason that epitaphs collected in a book do not
interest me or anyone. They are in the wrong place in a book and cannot
produce the same effect as when one finds and spells them out on a
weathered stone or mural tablet out or inside a village church. It is
the atmosphere - the place, the scene, the associations, which give it
its only value and sometimes make it beautiful and precious. The stone
itself, its ancient look, half-hidden in many cases by ivy, and clothed
over in many-coloured moss and lichen and aerial algae, and the
stonecutter's handiwork, his lettering, and the epitaphs he revelled
in - all this is lost when you take the inscription away and print it.
Take this one, for instance, as a specimen of a fairly good
seventeenth-century epitaph, from Shrewton, a village on Salisbury
Plain, not far from Stonehenge:
HERE IS MY HOPE TILL TRVMP
SHALL SOVND AND CHRIST
FOR MEE DOTH CALL THEN
SHALL I RISE FROM DEATH
TO LIFE NOE MORETO
DYE AT ALL
R
HERE LIES THE BODY OF ROBET
WANESBROVGH THE SD
E O ED
OF Y NAME W DEPART THIS
R E
LIFE DEC Y 9TH AODNI 1675
It would not be very interesting to put this in a book:
Here is my hope till trump shall sound
And Christ for me doth call,
Then shall I rise from death to life
No more to die at all.
But it was interesting to find it there, to examine the old lettering
and think perhaps that if you had been standing at the elbow of the old
lapidary, two and a half centuries ago, you might have given him a
wrinkle in the economising of space and labour. In any case, to find it
there in the dim, rich interior of that ancient village church, to view
it in a religious or reverent mood, and then by-and-by in the dusty
belfry to stumble on other far older memorials of the same family, and
finally, coming out into the sunny churchyard, to come upon the same
name once more in an inscription which tells you that he died in 1890,
aged 88. And you think it a good record after nine generations, and
that the men who lie under these wide skies on these open chalk downs
do not degenerate.
I have copied these inscriptions for a purpose of my own, just as one
plucks a leaf or a flower and drops it between the pages of a book he
is reading to remind him on some future occasion, when by chance he
finds it again on opening the book at some future time, of the scene,
the place, the very mood of the moment.
