Formal inscription, the disgust you will experience at their extreme
ugliness will drive you from the spot, and so cause you to miss some
delicate loveliness lurking there, like a violet "half hidden from the
eye." But I need not go into this subject here, as I have had my say
about it in a well-known book - Hampshire Days.
The stones I look at are of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half
of the nineteenth centuries, for even down to the fifties of last
century something of the old tradition lingered on, and not all the
stones were shaped and lettered in imitation of an auctioneer's
advertisement posted on a barn door.
In reading the old inscriptions, often deciphered with difficulty after
scraping away the moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one that
has the charm of quaintness, or which touches our heart or sense of
humour in such a way as to tempt us to copy it into a note-book.
In this way I have copied a fair number, and in glancing over my old
note-books containing records of my rambles and observations, mostly
natural history, I find these old epitaphs scattered through them. But
I have never copied an inscription with the intention of using it.
