An amusing variant of one of the commoner forms of that time appears at
Lelant, a Cornish village near St. Ives:
What now you are so once was me,
What now I am that you will be,
Therefore prepare to follow me.
No less remarkable in grammar as in the identical or perfect rhyme in
the first and third lines. The author or adapter could have escaped
this by making the two first the expression of the person buried
beneath, and the third the comment from the outsider, as follows:
Therefore prepare to follow she,
It was a woman, I must say.
This form of epitaph is quite common, and I need not give here more
examples from my notes, but the better convention coming down from the
preceding age goes on becoming more and more modified all through the
eighteenth, and even to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The following from St. Erth, a Cornish village, is a most suitable
inscription on the grave of an old woman who was a nurse in the same
family from 1750 to 1814:
Time rolls her ceaseless course; the race of yore
That danced our infancy on their knee
And told our wondering children Legends lore
Of strange adventures haped by Land and Sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
