AN EPITAPH: A CLUE WANTED.
Ito THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR."' SIR, ---I wonder if any one can give me the clue to the following. It lies, I suppose, in ,the source of the verses concerned. In High Ercall churchyard (Shropshire) there occurs the follow- ing epitaph of date 17-- (last two figures illegible) :— " When terrestrial all in chaos shall exhibit effervescence Then celestial virtues in their most Refulgent Brilliant essence
Shall with beaming Beauteous Hesitance thro' the Ebulli- tion shine Transcending to glorious Regions, Beatifical, Sublime; Human power, nbsorb'd, deficient to delineate such efful- gent lasting sparks, Where honest plebeians shall have . presidence o'er ambiguous great monarchs."
[It would make sense (!) if we took " deficient " to stand for "is deficient.") Now in Campbell and Garnett's Lifo of the great physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, p. 179, I found in a letter written by "J. C. M." to C. J. Moore the words: " . . . . or, as H-- would say, Terrestrial all in Chaos shall exhibit efflorescence." Here we have, very nearly, the first line of the above curious epitaph. The words are so quaint that there must surely be a common source from which the writer of the epitaph and this "H—" drew. It is very unlikely that any one would hare visited this out-of-the-way churchyard. I know the epitaph only because my father was Vicar of the parish and my uncle after him. I never saw a traveller'"poking about"
in the village.—I am, Sir, dc., WALTER Lasses.
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