The convention of that age appears again in the following inscription
from a tablet in Aldermaston church, in that beautiful little Berkshire
village, once the home of the Congreves:
Like borne, like new borne, here like dead they lie,
Four virgin sisters decked with pietie
Beauty and other graces which commend
And made them like blessed in the end.
Which means they were very much like each other, and were all as pure
in heart as new-born babes, and that they all died unmarried.
Where the epitaph-maker of that time occasionally went wrong was in his
efforts to get his fantasticalness in willy-nilly, or in a silly play
upon words, as in the following example from the little village of
Boyton on the Wylie river, on a man named Barnes, who died in 1638:
Stay Passenger and view a stack of corne
Reaped and laid up in the Almighty's Barne
Or rather Barnes of Choyce and precious grayne
Put in his garner there still to remaine.
But in the very next village - that of Stockton - I came on the best I
have found of that time. It is, however, a little earlier in time,
before fantasticalness came into fashion, and in spirit is of the
nobler age.
