In any case, to find it
there in the dim, rich interior of that ancient village church, to view
it in a religious or reverent mood, and then by-and-by in the dusty
belfry to stumble on other far older memorials of the same family, and
finally, coming out into the sunny churchyard, to come upon the same
name once more in an inscription which tells you that he died in 1890,
aged 88. And you think it a good record after nine generations, and
that the men who lie under these wide skies on these open chalk downs
do not degenerate.
I have copied these inscriptions for a purpose of my own, just as one
plucks a leaf or a flower and drops it between the pages of a book he
is reading to remind him on some future occasion, when by chance he
finds it again on opening the book at some future time, of the scene,
the place, the very mood of the moment.
Now, after all said, I am going to quote a few of my old gleanings from
gravestones, not because they are good of their kind - my collection
will look poor and meagre enough compared with those that others have
made - but I have an object in doing it which will appear presently in
the comments.
Always the best epitaphs to be found in books are those composed by
versifiers for their own and the reading public's amusement, and always
the best in the collection are the humorous ones.
The first collection I ever read was by the Spanish poet, Martinez de
la Rosa, and although I was a boy then, I can still remember one:
Aqui Fray Diego reposa,
Jamas hiso otra cosa.
Which, translated literally, means:
Here Friar James reposes:
He never did anything else.
This does well enough on the printed page, but would shock the mind if
seen on a gravestone, and perhaps the rarest of all epitaphs are the
humorous ones. But one is pleased to meet with the unconsciously
humorous; the little titillation, the smile, is a relief, and does not
take away the sense of the tragedy of life and the mournful end.
A good specimen of the unconsciously humorous epitaph is on a stone in
the churchyard at Maddington, a small village in the Wiltshire Downs,
dated 1843:
These few lines have been procured
To tell the pains which he endured,
He was crushed to death by the fall
Of an old mould'ring, tottering wall.
All ye young people that pass by
Remember this and breathe a sigh,
Lord, let him hear thy pard'ning voice
And make his broken bones rejoice.
A better one, from the little village of Mylor, near Falmouth, has I
fancy been often copied:
His foot it slipped and he did fall,
Help! help! he cried, and that was all.
And still a better one I found in the churchyard of St. Margaret's at
Lynn, to John Holgate, aged 27, who died in 1712:
He hath gained his port and is at ease,
And hath escapt ye danger of ye seas,
His glass is run his life is gone,
Which to my thought never did no man no wronge.
That last line is remarkable, for although its ten slow words have
apparently fallen by chance into that form and express nothing but a
little negative praise of their subject, they say something more by
implication. They conceal a mournful protest against the cruelty and
injustice of his lot, and remind us of the old Italian folk-song, "O
Barnaby, why did you die?" With plenty of wine in the house and salad
in the garden, how wrong, how unreasonable of you to die! But even
while blaming you in so many words, we know, O Barnaby, that the
decision came not from you, and was an outrage, but dare not say so
lest he himself should be listening, and in his anger at one word
should take us away too before our time. It is unconsciously humorous,
yet with the sense of tears in it.
But there is no sense of tears in the unconscious humour of the solemn
or pompous epitaph composed by the village ignoramus.
A century ago the village idiot was almost always a member of the
little rustic community, and was even useful to it in two distinct
ways. He was "God's Fool," and compassion and sweet beneficent
instinct, or soul growths, flourished the more for his presence; and
secondly, he was a perpetual source of amusement, a sort of free cinema
provided by Nature for the children's entertainment. I am not sure that
his removal has not been a loss to the little rural centres of life.
Side by side with the village idiot there was the pompous person who
could not only read a book, but could put whole sentences together and
even make rhymes, and who on these grounds took an important part in
the life of the community. He was not only adviser and letter-writer to
his neighbours, but often composed inscriptions for their gravestones
when they were dead. But in the best specimen of this kind which I have
come upon, I feel pretty sure, from internal evidence, that the buried
man had composed his own epitaph, and probably designed the form of the
stone and its ornamentation. I found this stone in the churchyard of
Minturne Magna, in Dorset. The stone was five feet high and four and a
half broad - a large canvas, so to speak.
