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!
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.
Rather too long for my chapter, but I quote it for the sake of the last
four lines, characteristic of that period, the age of conceits, of the
love of fantasticalness, of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan.
A jump from Ripon of 600 odd miles to the little village of Ludgvan,
near Penzance, brings us to a tablet of nearly the same date, 1635, and
an inscription conceived in the same style and spirit. It is
interesting, on account of the name of Catherine Davy, an ancestress of
the famous Sir Humphry, whose marble statue stands before the Penzance
Market House facing Market Jew Street.
Death shall not make her memory to rott
Her virtues were too great to be forgott.
Heaven hath her soul where it must still remain
The world her worth to blazon forth her fame
The poor relieved do honour and bless her name.
Earth, Heaven, World, Poor, do her immortalize
Who dying lives and living never dies.
Here is another of 1640:
Here lyeth the body of my Husband deare
Whom next to God I did most love and fear.
Our loves were single: we never had but one
And so I'll be although that thou art gone.
Which means that she has no intention of marrying again. Why have I set
this inscription down? Solely to tell how I copied it. I saw it on a
brass in the obscure interior of a small village church in Dorset, but
placed too high up on the wall to be seen distinctly. By piling seven
hassocks on top of one another I got high up enough to read the date
and inscription, but before securing the name I had to get quickly down
for fear of falling and breaking my neck. The hassocks had added five
feet to my six.
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. It is to Elizabeth Potecary, who died in 1590.
Here she interred lies deprived of breath
Whose light of virtue once on Earth did shyne
Who life contemned ne feared ghostly death
Whom worlde ne worldlye cares could cause repine
Resolved to die with hope in Heaven placed
Her Christ to see whom living she embraced
In paynes most fervent still in zeal most strong
In death delighting God to magnifye
How long will thou forgett me Lord! this cry
In greatest pangs was her sweet harmonye
Forgett thee? No! he will not thee forgett
In books of Lyfe thy name for aye is set.
And with Elizabeth Potecary, that dear lady dead these three centuries
and longer, I must bring this particular Little Thing to an end.