Poor Diana deserved a less casual word!
Enough of that kind. The next to follow is the quite plain, sensible,
narrative inscription, with no pretension to fine diction, albeit in
rhyme. Oddly enough the most perfect example I have found is in the
churchyard at Kew, which seems too near to London:
Here lyith the bodies of Robert and Ann
Plaistow, late of Tyre, Edghill, in Warwickshire,
Dyed August 23, 1728.
At Tyre they were born and bred
And in the same good lives they led,
Until they come to married state,
Which was to them most fortunate.
Near sixty years of mortal life
They were a happy man and wife,
And being so by Nature tyed
When one fell sick the other dyed,
And both together laid in dust
To await the rising of the just.
They had six children born and bred,
And five before them being dead,
Their only then surviving son
Hath caused this stone for to be done.
After this little masterpiece I will quote no other in this class.
After copying some scores of inscriptions, we find that there has
always been a convention or fashion in such things, and that it has
been constantly but gradually changing during the last three centuries.
Very few of the seventeenth century, which are the best, are now
decipherable, out of doors at all events.
