The Project Gutenberg EBook of Quaint Epitaphs, by Various

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Title: Quaint Epitaphs

Author: Various

Release Date: September 5, 2007 [EBook #22518]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUAINT EPITAPHS ***

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Transcriber's Notes

Non-standard spellings, typos and non-standard punctuation have
been left as they appear in the original, except in a few
cases where standardization was needed for clarity.

* * * * *

"Quaint Epitaphs"

COLLECTED BY

SUSAN DARLING SAFFORD.

COPYRIGHT, 1895,

BY SUSAN DARLING SAFFORD.

ALFRED MUDGE & SON, PRINTERS, 24 FRANKLIN STREET, BOSTON.

INTRODUCTION.

This collection of epitaphs was started in a very modest fashion about
thirty-five years ago, when the compiler found great pleasure in
searching all the graveyards near her Vermont home for quaint
inscriptions upon old tombstones. It was neither a morbid curiosity nor
a spirit of melancholy that attracted her to the weather-beaten slabs of
marble and slate, but rather a fondness for studying human eccentricity
as revealed in whimsical epitaphs. In almost every graveyard one can
find

"Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked"

and these have given many hours of pleasure to one who finds in such
sombre elegies of the dead most interesting reflections of the living.

As the only purpose of carrying on such odd researches was to satisfy a
fondness for freakish ingenuity, much less interest was found in the
thousands of amusing epitaphs that are penned by writers for comic
papers or by wags in general. Fictitious inscriptions lack the charm of
authenticity, which in the case of epitaphs is decidedly more desirable
than imagination. All selections which could not be definitely located
are classed by themselves, but many of these are known to have actually
existed, though for varying reas