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 God 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
brass 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
hassocks 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 hassocks 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 willy-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 Passenger 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
nobler age.
