There Are Many Beautiful Stones And Appropriate Inscriptions During All That Long Period, In Spite Of The Advent Of Mr. Buggins And His Ugliness, And The Charm And Pathos Is Often In A Phrase, A Single Line, As In This From St. Keverne, 1710, A Widow's Epitaph On Her Husband:

Rest here awhile, thou dearest part of me.

But let us now get back another century at a jump, to the Jacobean and Caroline period. And for these one must look as a rule in interiors, seeing that, where exposed to the weather, the lettering, if not the whole stone, has perished. Perhaps the best specimen of the grave inscription, lofty but not pompous, of that age which I have met with is on a tablet in Ripon Cathedral to Hugh de Ripley, a locally important man who died in 1637:

Others seek titles to their tombs Thy deeds to thy name prove new wombes And scutcheons to deck their Herse Which thou need'st not like teares and vers. If I should praise thy thriving witt Or thy weighed judgment serving it Thy even and thy like straight ends Thy pitie to God and to friends The last would still the greatest be And yet all jointly less than thee. Thou studiedst conscience more than fame Still to thy gathered selfe the same. Thy gold was not thy saint nor welth Purchased by rapine worse than stealth Nor did'st thou brooding on it sit Not doing good till death with it. This many may blush at when they see What thy deeds were what theirs should be. Thou'st gone before and I wait now T'expect my when and wait my how Which if my Jesus grant like thine Who wets my grave's no friend of mine.

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