A Traveller in Little Things Part 16

He hath gained his port and is at ease, And hath escapt ye danger of ye seas, His gla.s.s is run his life is gone, Which to my thought never did no man no wronge.

That last line is remarkable, for although its ten slow words have apparently fallen by chance into that form and express nothing but a little negative praise of their subject, they say something more by implication. They conceal a mournful protest against the cruelty and injustice of his lot, and remind us of the old Italian folk-song, "O Barnaby, why did you die?" With plenty of wine in the house and salad in the garden, how wrong, how unreasonable of you to die! But even while blaming you in so many words, we know, O Barnaby, that the decision came not from you, and was an outrage, but dare not say so lest he himself should be listening, and in his anger at one word should take us away too before our time. It is unconsciously humorous, yet with the sense of tears in it.

But there is no sense of tears in the unconscious humour of the solemn or pompous epitaph composed by the village ignoramus.

A century ago the village idiot was almost always a member of the little rustic community, and was even useful to it in two distinct ways. He was "G.o.d's Fool," and compa.s.sion and sweet beneficent instinct, or soul growths, flourished the more for his presence; and secondly, he was a perpetual source of amus.e.m.e.nt, a sort of free cinema provided by Nature for the children's entertainment. I am not sure that his removal has not been a loss to the little rural centres of life.

Side by side with the village idiot there was the pompous person who could not only read a book, but could put whole sentences together and even make rhymes, and who on these grounds took an important part in the life of the community. He was not only adviser and letter-writer to his neighbours, but often composed inscriptions for their gravestones when they were dead. But in the best specimen of this kind which I have come upon, I feel pretty sure, from internal evidence, that the buried man had composed his own epitaph, and probably designed the form of the stone and its ornamentation. I found this stone in the churchyard of Minturne Magna, in Dorset. The stone was five feet high and four and a half broad--a large canvas, so to speak. On the upper half a Tree of Knowledge was depicted, with leaves and apples, the serpent wound about the trunk, with Adam and Eve standing on either side. Eve is extending her arm, with an apple in her open hand, to Adam, and he, foolish man, is putting out a hand to take it. Then follows the extraordinary inscription:

Here lyeth the Body Of Richard Elambert, Late of Holnust, who died June 6, in the year 1805, in the 100 year of his age.

Neighbours make no stay, Return unto the Lord, Nor put it off from day to day, For Death's a debt ye all must pay.

Ye knoweth not how soon, It may be the next moment, Night, morning or noon.

I set this as a caution To my neighbours in rime, G.o.d give grace that you May all repent in time.

For what G.o.d has decreed, We surely must obey, For when please G.o.d to send His death's dart into us so keen, O then we must go hence And be no more here seen.

ALSO

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 cla.s.s.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tles 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 bra.s.s 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 ha.s.socks 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 ha.s.socks 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 w.i.l.l.y-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 Pa.s.senger 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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.d 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.