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 titles 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 God 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.
