[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1
Sur.,—An epitaph very like that sent you by Mr. Reade is, or was, on a stone in the Old Churchyard at Liverpool. It is dated 17£0, and is this :—
" This town's a corporation, full of crooked streets, Death is the market place where all men meets; If life was merchandise that men could buy, The rich would always live, the poor would die." It may interest Mr. Reade and others to know that in the play of " The Two Noble Kinsmen," first printed in 1634, and of which the first act was considered by Coleridge to have been written by Shakespeare, the last two lines of that act are these:— "This world's a city, full of straying streets ; •
And death's the market-place where each one meets."
The mystery is, how lines from a play, never likely to have been much read or acted, came to be copied or imitated on gravestones, more than a century after the date of the play, at Shotteswell, Liverpool, and, doubtless, other places. Or, did the writer of the play appropriate lines independently familiar to the people P—I am, Sir, &e.,
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