tion of the foregoing example in
the same churchyard, even more remarkably at variance with Scriptural
interpretation.

It is dedicated

"To John Clark, died 1793, aged 62 years;
and Rebecca his wife, died 1794, aged 61
years."

The inscription adds:

"What manner of persons these were the last
day will discover."

Gravestone plagiarism of this sort is very common, and there is to be
found at West Ham, Essex, the same symbolical flight of the angel and
child repeated as many as five times.

The pilfering is not so weak and lamentable when the copyist
appropriates merely the idea and works it out in a new fashion. The
term new can hardly be attributed to the notion of a plucked flower
as a type of death, but it occurs in so many varieties as almost to
redeem its conventionality.

The sculptor of a stone which is in Dartford burial-ground probably
had the suggestion from a predecessor.

FIG. 7.--AT DARTFORD.

"To James Terry, died 1755, aged 31 years."

But not far from it in the same burial-ground, which is really a
cemetery separated from the parish church, and one of the oldest
cemeteries in England, is another imitation quite differently brought
out, but in principle essentially the same.

FIG. 8.--AT DARTFORD.

"To....Callow, died....1794...."

At the churchyard of Stone (or Greenhithe), two or three miles
from Dartford, both these floral emblems are reproduced with strict
fidelity.

This first chapter and the sketches which illustrate it will serve to
introduce and explain my work and its scope.

In pursuing my investigations it was soon evident that the period of
the allegorical gravestone was confined sharply and almost exclusively
to the eighteenth century. I have seldom met one earlier than 1700,
and those subsequent to 1800 are very rare. Of gravestones generally
it may almost be said that specimens of seventeenth-century date
are exceedingly few. There are reasons for this, as will afterwards
appear. But the endurance even of the longest-lived of all the old
memorials cannot be very much longer extended, and this may be my
excuse for preserving and perpetuating the features of some of them as
a not uninteresting phase of the vanishing past. I do not claim for
my subject any great importance, but present it as one of the small
contributions which make up history. One other plea I may urge in my
defence. This is a branch of study which, so far as I can ascer