I said a little while ago that when staying at a village I am apt to
become a haunter of its churchyard; but I go not to it in the spirit of
our well-beloved Mr. Pecksniff. He, it will be remembered, was
accustomed to take an occasional turn among the tombs in the graveyard
at Amesbury, or wherever it was, to read and commit to memory the pious
and admonitory phrases he found on the stones, to be used later as a
garnish to his beautiful, elevating talk. The attraction for me, which
has little to do with inscriptions, was partly stated in the last
sketch, and I may come to it again by-and-by.
Nevertheless, I cannot saunter or sit down among these memorials
without paying some attention to the lettering on them, and always with
greatest interest in those which time and weather and the corrosive
lichen have made illegible. The old stones that are no longer visited,
on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last
resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members
of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten for ever, whose
bones for a century past have been crumbling to dust. And the
children's children, and remoter descendants of these dead, where are
they? since one refuses to believe that they inhabit this land any
longer. Under what suns, then, by what mountains and what mighty
rivers, on what great green or sun-parched plains and in what roaring
cities in far-off continents? They have forgotten; they have no memory
nor tradition of these buried ones, nor perhaps even know the name of
this village where they lived and died. Yet we believe that something
from these same dead survives in them--something, too, of the place,
the village, the soil, an inherited memory and emotion. At all events
we know that, wheresoever they may be, that their soul is English
still, that they will hearken to their mother's voice when she calls
and come to her from the very ends of the earth.
As to the modern stones with inscriptions made so plain that you can
read them at a distance of twenty yards, one cultivates the art of not
seeing them, since if you look attentively at them and read the dull
formal inscription, the disgust you will experience at their extreme
ugliness will drive you from the spot, and so cause you to miss some
delicate loveliness lurking there, like a violet "half hidden from the
eye." But I need not go into this subject here, as I have had my say
about it in a well-known book--Hampshire Days.
The stones I look at are of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half
of the nineteenth centuries, for even down to the fifties of last
century something of the old tradition lingered on, and not all the
stones were shaped and lettered in imitation of an auctioneer's
advertisement posted on a barn door.
In reading the old inscriptions, often deciphered with difficulty after
scraping away the moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one that
has the charm of quaintness, or which touches our heart or sense of
humour in such a way as to tempt us to copy it into a note-book.
In this way I have copied a fair number, and in glancing over my old
note-books containing records of my rambles and observations, mostly
natural history, I find these old epitaphs scattered through them. But
I have never copied an inscription with the intention of using it. And
this for the sufficient reason that epitaphs collected in a book do not
interest me or anyone. They are in the wrong place in a book and cannot
produce the same effect as when one finds and spells them out on a
weathered stone or mural tablet out or inside a village church. It is
the atmosphere--the place, the scene, the associations, which give it
its only value and sometimes make it beautiful and precious. The stone
itself, its ancient look, half-hidden in many cases by ivy, and clothed
over in many-coloured moss and lichen and aerial algae, and the
stonecutter's handiwork, his lettering, and the epitaphs he revelled
in--all this is lost when you take the inscription away and print it.
Take this one, for instance, as a specimen of a fairly good
seventeenth-century epitaph, from Shrewton, a village on Salisbury
Plain, not far from Stonehenge:
HERE IS MY HOPE TILL TRVMP
SHALL SOVND AND CHRIST
FOR MEE DOTH CALL THEN
SHALL I RISE FROM DEATH
TO LIFE NOE MORETO
DYE AT ALL
R
HERE LIES THE BODY OF ROBET
WANESBROVGH THE SD
E O ED
OF Y NAME W DEPART THIS
R E
LIFE DEC Y 9TH AODNI 1675
It would not be very interesting to put this in a book:
Here is my hope till trump shall sound
And Christ for me doth call,
Then shall I rise from death to life
No more to die at all.
But it was interesting to find it there, to examine the old lettering
and think perhaps that if you had been standing at the elbow of the old
lapidary, two and a half centuries ago, you might have given him a
wrinkle in the economising of space and labour. 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. On the upper half a Tree of
Knowledge was depicted, with leaves and apples, the serpent wound about
the trunk, with Adam and Eve standing on either side. Eve is extending
her arm, with an apple in her open hand, to Adam, and he, foolish man,
is putting out a hand to take it. 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.