There ye flak'd surge opprest my darkening sight,
And there my eyes for ever lost the light.

"Captain George Colvill of the Private Ship
of War 'Amazon,' and only son of
Robert Colvill of Bangor, was wrecked
near this ground 25th February 1780, in
ye 22nd year of his age."

A possible explanation of the long endurance of this slate slab may
be found in the practice which prevails in this and some other
churchyards of giving all such memorials a periodical coat of paint;
of which, however, in the case here quoted there is no remaining
trace.

Altogether, primitive as they may be, the gravestones of the last
century in Ireland, so far as I have seen them, compare favourably
with the works of the hedge-mason in England which we have seen
in earlier chapters. Even the poor pillar of rough stone, unhewn,
ungarnished, and bare as it is, represents an affectionate remembrance
of the dead which is full of pathos, and has a refinement in its
simplicity which commands our sympathy far above the semi-barbarous
engravings of heads and skulls which we have previously pictured. The
immaturity of provincial art in Ireland is at least redeemed by an
absence of such monstrous figures and designs as we at the present
day usually associate with the carvings of savages in the African
interior.

But the eighteenth-century gravestones in Ireland are not all of the
primitive kind--many of them being as artistic and well-finished as
any to be found in other parts of the British Isles. The predominant
type is the "I.H.S.," surmounted by the cross, which appears on
probably four-fifths of the inscribed stones of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries in Ireland. The only instances which came
under my notice bearing any resemblance to the incipient notions of
human heads so frequently met with in certain parts of England
were the three here copied (Fig. 91). Nos. 2 and 3 are taken from
gravestones in the old churchyard near Queenstown, and the other
appears in duplicate on one stone at Muckross Abbey by the Lakes of
Killarney.[11] The stately wreck of Muckross Abbey has in its decay
enclosed within its walls the tombs of knights and heroes whose
monuments stand in gorgeous contrast to the desolation which is
mouldering around them; while on the south side of the ancient edifice
is the graveyard in which the peasant-fathers of the hamlet sleep,
the green mounds which cover them in some instances marked