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.
