EPITAPHS.

ARATHER meagre selection of epitaphs by Mr. Fairley which has just been published by Mr. S. Tinsley, and which—for so small a collection—deals too much a great deal in those purely literary would-be epitaphs which were never pro- bably really inscribed on any tomb, supplies, nevertheless, ample illustration of the sort of scoffing contempt with which our ruder fathers were too frequently accustomed to regard those who had once succumbed to the power of death. The old saying that a "living dog is better than a dead lion," seems to us to supply the main key to the often extraordinarily and brutally jocose literature of the graveyard. Of course, the quaintest part of this literature or illiterature has been mainly created by illiterate and ignorant men, —stonemasons probably, who, for cheapness' sake, combined with their profession of stone-cutters that of amateur poets and epitaph-writers,—often, no doubt, throwing in the rhyme for nothing, and charging only for the time and labour of inscribing it, and persuading the ignorant friends of the deceased that it was honour enough to enshrine the name of the dead in a jingling verse, even though that jingling verse contained neither pity, reverence, nor affection. Doubtless to thousands of mourners, the verse which commemorated the dead was r3pre- seated as a mere element of sepulchral dignity, which no one expected to see marked by either discriminating knowledge or tender feeling. Of course every allowance must be made for this state of things,—for the vacuity of mind which could not read the inscription, and still less judge it, for the poverty which was obliged to be content with anything it could get, for the help- lessness which had no energy to alter or obliterate what bad once been inscribed, even though that might be a brutal joke. But granting this to the fall, and admitting that the quaint old graveyard inscriptions as we see them very often misrepresent and very often caricature the feelings of the real relations, it must be admitted that enough evidence remains that the view taken of death by our ancestors had in it much more of the tone of coarse amusement at the scrape which the dead had fallen into,—at the practical joke, as it were, of which they had become the victims,— than of any feeling of awe and grief. Of coarse there is a redun- dancy of conventional religions moralities as to the necessity of preparing for death throughout the whole of the Churchyard literature. But that is far the least real and characteristic part of

it,—that is the common form of religious propriety. Where the quaintness of natural comment appears, it is, in 'perhaps one case in every three, in the shape of a broad grin at the help- lessness and imbecility of people who were so active and energetic in their lifetime. Nothing is more delightful to the graveyard writer than to dwell on the professional details of the dead man's or woman's energy, and almost to gloat over the incapacity for manifesting that energy any more. For instance, Mr. Fairley answers for it that in five graveyards known to him, namely, that of Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight ; of Felpham, Sussex ; of Westham, Essex ; of Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire ; and of Houghton, Hunts, there is to be found the welleknown black- smith's epitaph :—

"My sledge and hammer lie declined, My bellows, too, have lost their wind ; My fire is spent, my forge deeay'd, My vice is on the dust all laid ; My coal is spent, my iron gone, My nails are drove, my work is done ; My fire-dried corpse here lies at rest, My soul, smoke-like, soars to be blest."

A still more remarkable example of a certain spiteful triumph over the dead is illustrated by the epitaph on a parish sexton, whom the parishioners, we suppose, could not quite forgive for having buried so many of their friends (but which, by the way, Mr. Fairley fails to locate in any individual churchyard) :-

"Here lies old Hare, worn out with care,

Who whilom tolled the bell; Could dig a grave, or set a stave, And say Amen full well.

For sacred songs he'd Sternhold's tongue,

And Hopkin's eke also ; With cough and hem, he stood by them, As far as lungs would go.

Many a feast for worms he drest, Himself then wanting bread; But, lo ! he's gone, with skin and bone To starve 'em now he's dead.

Here take his spade' and use his trade,

Since he is out of breath ;

Cover the bones of him who once

Wrought journey-work for Death."

And what can be more coarsely scornful than this, on a drunkard, in Leigh Delamere Churchyard, Wilts,—in its exultation that the drunkard can drink no more, though you may insult him by suggesting it ?—

" Who lies here ? Who do 'e think, Why, old Clapper Watts, if you'll give him some drink. Give a dead man drink ?—for why ?

Why, when he was alive he was always a-dry."

One that even exceeds it in brutality is the epitaph on a "York- shire cook," if it be a real epitaph, and not merely a literary exercise :—

"Underneath this crust Lies the mouldering dust Of Eleanor Batchelor Shoven, Well versed in the Arts Of pies, custards, and tarts, And the lucrative trade of the oven.

When she lived long enough She made her last puff,

A puff by her husband much praised,

And now she doth lie

And make a dirt pie, In hopes that her crust may be raised."

No doubt, however, there are a good many in which the main motive is not a rude sentiment of all but triumph over the helpless- ness of the dead, but rather a clumsy, yet humorous sense of the para- dox of death, in the case of people chiefly known for their small professional activities, as, for example, in this epitaph from Chichester Cathedral, on a crier of periwinkles :—

g Perivrinks, Periwinkles was ever her cry;

She laboured to live, poor and honest to die.

At the last day again how her old eyes will twinkle!

For no more will she cry, 'Periwinks, Periwinkle!'

Ye rich, to virtuous want regard pray give ; Ye poor, by her example, learn to live.

Died Jan. 1, 1786, Aged 77."

The genuine grotesquerie there has not a touch of cruelty or even hardness in it,—there is even a pathetic sort of religious faith in the anticipation how the poor old creature's eyes will twinkle at having survived the necessity of crying "periwinkles," but the writer cannot suppress his feeling of the strangeness of the contrast between a life devoted to calling periwinkles, and the prospect of spiritual judgment and eternal reward for the dutiful discharge of that humble duty. There seems to be an inconsequence about the connection between life, death, and immortality in such a case, which wholly occupies him, and gets itself expressed in the doggrel epitaph. There is, too, a marked tendency to "conceits" in the epitaphs on tombs, though, of course, of a very lame and hobbling kind, where they are attempted, as they often are, by a versifying stone- mason. We suppose that the pleasure apparently taken in mere conceits on tombstones, springs naturally Out of the sense of paradox attached by the living to the fact of death ;—even when the epitaph-writer does not dwell on this paradox, he has prob- ably been thrown into the mood of conceits by the effort to say something which shall be as striking as the event seems to him, and by the impossibility of doing so without verbal pretentious- ness. Take this, for instance, copied by Mr. Fairley, from the churchyard of Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire, as the type of a considerable class of epitaphs, though not quite as imbecile as many of the class. It is on a man of the name of Cave :—

"Here in this grave there lies a Cave : We call a cave a grave.

If cave be grave, and grave be Cave, Then reader, judge, I crave, Whether doth Cave lie here in grave Or grave here lie in Cave; If grave in Cave here buried lie, Then, grave, where is thy victory ?

Go, reader, and report here lies a Cave, Who conquers death, and buries his own grave."

For some reason, connected, we suppose, with this desire to be striking and the difficulty of being so, nothing seems commoner than puns on the name of the deceased, which one would suppose the most unnatural of all kinds of epitaph. In Gloucester Cathedral, for instance, there is said by Mr. Fairley to be one on a gentleman of the name of Calf, which is quite imbecile, as well as limning,—

"Oh, cruel Death, more subtle than the Fox, To kill this Calf before he came an Ox,"

—with which the French one, not quite so silly, on M. Jean Le Vean may be compared :—

"Ci-git le jeune Jean Le Vean, Sans devenir Bceuf on Taurean."

Here, again, is a very bad and a very silly pun on a name by way of epitaph, on Mr. John Rosewell, A.D. 1687 (place of burial not given by Mr. Fairley)

"This grave's a bed of roses :—here cloth lie

John Rosewell, gent.; his wife, nine children, by."

And here is a grotesque combination of Scripture and pun which makes the love of conceits of this kind, in epitaphs, still more remarkable. It is from Barrow Churchyard, and on the grave of a Mrs. Stone :-

"Jerusalem's curse is not fulfilled in me,

For here a stone upon a Stone you see."

This impression that there is something quizzical in death, which makes it natural, to quibble over the dead, like Shakespeare's gravediggers in "Hamlet," seems to have been very strongly adopted in the other hemisphere of English-speaking men. Look at the jest-books of the United States, and you will find a great deal of the spirit of those truculently jocose gravediggers who even now are so popular on the English stage. Even Mr. Fairley has borrowed not a few somewhat brutal jokes from the United States graveyards, of which the most clever are the advertising epitaphs, such as these :—

" Here lies Jane Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble-cutter ; this monument was erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monuments of the same style, 250 dollars."

"Died on the 11th inst., at his shop, No. 20 Greenwich Street, Mr. Edward Jones, much respected by all who knew and dealt with him. As a man he was amiable ; as a hatter upright and moderate. His virtues were beyond all price, and his beaver hats were only three dollars each. He has left a widow to deplore his loss, and a large stock to be sold cheap, for the benefit of his family. Ho was snatched to the other world in the prime of life, just as he had concluded an extensive purchase of felt, which he got so cheap that his widow can supply hats at more reasonable rates than any house in the city. His disconsolate family will carry on business with punctuality."

The sort of epitaph which you would expect to be most frequent amongst illiterate men, an attempt to paint rudely the person buried, seems to be by far the least common of any. Of course, in the case of misers and drunkards there is a disposition to touch on their main vices, and in the case of professional men, like lawyers, or parish clerks, or blacksmiths, or bakers, there is often

some rude joke about their profession or its morality, but nothing is rarer than an attempt to paint the deceased, even in dress, such as the following, from Mathern Churchyard, Chepstow, on an old WAD. who was said to have reached the age of 103 :— "Joseph Lee is dead and gone, We ne'eishall see him more ;

He used to wear an old drab coat,

All buttoned down before."

Even this, bald as it is, is far preferable to the doggrel which is so much commoner, for it brings a costume at least, though not a character, before the eyes, and Mr. Fairley might, we think, have enlarged the number of these comparatively rare attempts at rude portraiture. One of this kind, which we copied in Cookham Churchyard, if we remember rightly, has no little merit, though not precisely of verse, in this art of simple portraiture. It was in memory of W. H. P., who died 8th June, 1873, aged 27 years :—

" Scarce does the sun each morning rise and close its evening ray

Without some human sacrifice, some tragic scene display.

A shocking accident occurred ! Alas ! with grief I toll, The youth who now lies here interred, to Death a victim fell. Well could he drive the coursers fleet, which oft he drove before, When, turning round a narrow street, he fell to rise no more. No one commanded more respect, obliging, kind, and fair,

None charged him with the least neglect, none drove with greater care.

He little thought when he arose that fatal 5th of June That morn his life's career would close and terminate so soon.

Tho' snatch'd from earth, we hope and trust he's called to joys above, Virtues like his, so pure, so just, ensure celestial love."

That very ungrammatical picture of the youth's amiable qualities in general, and complete vindication of him in particular from the sin of negligent driving with which people who only knew his end might be apt to charge him, has a touch of graphic power in it,— which is nearly the last thing epitaphs in general show.

It really seems that the contemplation of the death of any living fellow-creature excites rather fantastic than sad thoughts in the minds of mere acquaintances or even relatives who at heart were mere acquaintances, and that the grotesqueness of the conception that they have suddenly become mere passive subjects of talk or disquisi- tion, strikes people much more vividly than any feeling of sympathy with their unfinished purposes, or with the suffering of their friends. The oddity of death unquestionably appears to be the main idea running through the minds of epitaph-writers. That oddity turns some into humourists, and makes others simply brutal, but it is the reigning idea. Seldom comparatively does the wish of an epitaph- writer seem to be to give the knowledge requisite to excite admiration,—to convey a distinct conception likely to linger in the memory as a trace of what had once been fascinating and noble in life and had left a painful blank behind in the circle from which it had disappeared.