"Here lies the body of Sarah Sexton;
She was a wife who never vexed one,
I can't say as much for her at the next stone."

What sort of matrimonial existence must
Mr. Dent of Winchester have passed, I
wonder: who as soon as his Deborah was
grassed over, could indite upon her so flippant
a. couplet as this?

"Here lies the body of Deborah Dent,
She kicked up her heels and away she went."

We will charitably hope that it was the
extreme seductiveness of the rhyme, which
caused him to represent the lady as having
departed so very summarily. Our epitaph
makers will go a deal out of their way
for a good rhyme, and when they find a
dissyllable to match with another, they hesitate
at nothing in order to bring it in. At
Doncaster, for instance, I read:

"Here lies two brothers by misfortune surrounded,
One died of his wounds, and the other was drownded."

And again, at Bideford, Devon:

"Her marriage day appointed was,
And wedding-clothes provided,
But when the day arrivéd did.
She sickened and she died did."

This one from Saint Albans, on the other
hand, is so full of an original and striking
idea, that the sound becomes a secondary
object, if even that:

"Sacred to the memory of Miss Martha Groyn;
She was so very pure within,
She burst the outward shell of sin,
And hatched herself a cherubim."

And here again, at Dorchester, Oxon, is an
example of a bard in despair for a couplet,
who contents himself with stating a creditable
fact in indifferent prose:

"Here lies the body of an honest man,
And when he died he owed nobody nothing."

A prolonged medical statement of the
disease of which the departed may chance to
have died, is extremely popular. At Acton,
in Cornwall, there is this particular account
of how one Mr. Morton came by his end:

"Here lies entombed one Roger Morton,
Whose sudden death was early brought on;
Trying one day his corn to mow off,
The razor slipped and cut his toe off:
The toe, or rather what it grew to,
An inflammation quickly flew to;
The parts they took to mortifying,
And poor dear Roger took to dying."

And here is a still more entertaining one,
upon a certain lady in Devonshire: singularly
free from any nonsensical pretence or idle
bravado:

"Here lies Betsy Cruden,
She wood a leaf'd but she cooden,
'Twas na grief na sorrow as made she decay,
But this bad leg as carr'd she away."

Whenever I read (and it is often) of folks
who were passionately desirous to leave this
vale of tears, I shake my head, and quote the
simple-minded Betty: "For all this," say I,
"They wood a leaf'd, but they cooden."

There is a distressing inaccuracy of metaphor
in the following south country elegy;
but the meaning is painfully distinct:

"Here lies two babes as dead as nits,
They was cut off by ague fits."

A doctor of divinity, who lies in the
neighbourhood of Oxford, has his complaint stated
for him with unusual brevity, as well as his
place of interment:

"He died of a quinsy,
And was buried at Binsy."

To complete these medical extracts, I may
quote this warning cypress-flower, culled
from a Cheltenham cemetery:

"Here lies I and my three daughters
Killed by a drinking of the Cheltenham waters;
If we had stuck to Epsom salts,
We'd not been a lying in these here vaults."

There is, to my mind, a touching sorrow
conveyed in the following most
ungrammatical verses; evidently composed by one
of the unlettered Wiltshire parents
themselves:

"Beneath this stone his own dear child,
Whose gone from we
For ever more unto eternity;
Where we do hope that we shall go to he,
But him can never more come back to we.''

And something of the same kind, although
in a less degree, I feel belongs to this one
from Guilsfield, Montgomeryshire:

"Beneath this yew tree
Buried would he be,
Because his father, he,
Planted this yew tree."

A sensitive and dutiful heart is here ascribed
to the dead man, more certainly than it could
be by a score of pompous lines written at so
much the eulogistic adjective. I could tell
the exact figure, but I am mum, of course,
upon professional secrets. In Tuchan churchyard,
by the bye, there is this apt inscription:

"To the memory of Susan Mum.
Silence is Wisdom."

You never (I address myself to the reader),
happened to get hold of the Stone-cutter's.
Guide? It would be worth your while to
look into it when you have the chance. The
best epitaph that I can remember out of it
for general use is this one:

"He did not do much harm, nor yet much good,
And might have been much better, if he would."

But truth is not the object of epitaphs, and
I never have seen it written upon a tombstone.