- But I have an object in doing it which will appear presently in
the comments.
Always the best epitaphs to be found in books are those composed by
versifiers for their own and the reading public's amusement, and always
the best in the collection are the humorous ones.
The first collection I ever read was by the Spanish poet, Martinez de
la Rosa, and although I was a boy then, I can still remember one:
Aqui Fray Diego reposa,
Jamas hiso otra cosa.
Which, translated literally, means:
Here Friar James reposes:
He never did anything else.
This does well enough on the printed page, but would shock the mind if
seen on a gravestone, and perhaps the rarest of all epitaphs are the
humorous ones. But one is pleased to meet with the unconsciously
humorous; the little titillation, the smile, is a relief, and does not
take away the sense of the tragedy of life and the mournful end.
A good specimen of the unconsciously humorous epitaph is on a stone in
the churchyard at Maddington, a small village in the Wiltshire Downs,
dated 1843:
These few lines have been procured
To tell the pains which he endured,
He was crushed to death by the fall
Of an old mould'ring, tottering wall.
All ye young people that pass by
Remember this and breathe a sigh,
Lord, let him hear thy pard'ning voice
And make his broken bones rejoice.
A better one, from the little village of Mylor, near Falmouth, has I
fancy been often copied:
His foot it slipped and he did fall,
Help! help! he cried, and that was all.
And still a better one I found in the churchyard of St. Margaret's at
Lynn, to John Holgate, aged 27, who died in 1712:
He hath gained his port and is at ease,
And hath escapt ye danger of ye seas,
His glass is run his life is gone,
Which to my thought never did no man no wronge.
That last line is remarkable, for although its ten slow words have
apparently fallen by chance into that form and express nothing but a
little negative praise of their subject, they say something more by
implication. They conceal a mournful protest against the cruelty and
injustice of his lot, and remind us of the old Italian folk-song, "O
Barnaby, why did you die?" With plenty of wine in the house and salad
in the garden, how wrong, how unreasonable of you to die! But even
while blaming you in so many words, we know, O Barnaby, that the
decision came not from you, and was an outrage, but dare not say so
lest he himself should be listening, and in his anger at one word
should take us away too before our time.
