Then follows the extraordinary
inscription:
Here lyeth the Body
Of Richard Elambert,
Late of Holnust, who died
June 6, in the year 1805, in the
100 year of his age.
Neighbours make no stay,
Return unto the Lord,
Nor put it off from day to day,
For Death's a debt ye all must pay.
Ye knoweth not how soon,
It may be the next moment,
Night, morning or noon.
I set this as a caution
To my neighbours in rime,
God give grace that you
May all repent in time.
For what God has decreed,
We surely must obey,
For when please God to send
His death's dart into us so keen,
O then we must go hence
And be no more here seen.
ALSO
Handy lyeth here
Dianna Elambert,
Which was my only daughter dear,
Who died Jan. 10, 1776,
In the 18th year of her age.
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. In an old graveyard you will
perhaps find two or three among two or three hundred stones, yet you
believe that two to three hundred years ago the small space was as
thickly peopled with stones as now. The two or three or more that have
not perished are of the very hardest kind of stone, and the old letters
often show that they were cut with great difficulty. We also find that
apart from the convention of the age or time, there were local
conventions or fashions. In some parts of the South of England you find
numbers of enormous stones five feet high and nearly as broad. This
mode has long vanished. But you find a resemblance in the inscriptions
as well. Thus, wherever the Methodists obtained a firm hold on the
community, you find the spirit of ugliness appearing in the village
churchyard from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, when the
old ornate and beautiful stones with figures of winged cherubs bearing
torches, scattering flowers or blowing trumpets, were the usual
decorations, giving place to the plain or ugly stone with its square
ugly lettering and the dull monotonous form of the inscription. "To the
memory of Mr. Buggins of this parish, who died on February 27th, 1801,
aged 67." And then, to save trouble and expense, a verse from a hymn,
or the simple statement that he is asleep in Jesus, or is awaiting the
resurrection.
I am inclined to blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it
is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another
cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against
the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common
in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Here is a perfect specimen which I found at St. Just, in Cornwall, to a
Martin Williams, 1771:
Life's but a snare, a Labyrinth of Woe
Which wretched Man is doomed to struggle through.
To-day he's great, to-morrow he's undone,
And thus with Hope and Fear he blunders on,
Till some disease, or else perhaps old Age
Calls us poor Mortals trembling from the Stage.
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!
