to poets who commend their wares in verse.
The widow bereft of her life's companion, the mother bending over an
empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of
verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest
times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows
and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them
somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as
memorials of their pleasure or their pain.

'Hark! how chimes the passing bell--
There's no music to a knell;
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter and but cheat our ear.'

So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the
popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever
wearies of Martial's 'Erotion'?--

'Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra,
Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems.
Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli
Manibus exiguis annua justa dato.
Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus
Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua'--

so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:

'Underneath this greedy stone
Lies little sweet Erotion,
Whom the Fates with hearts as cold
Nipped away at six years old.
Those, whoever thou may'st be,
That hast this small field after me,
Let the yearly rites be paid
To her little slender shade;
So shall no disease or jar
Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar,
But this tomb be here alone
The only melancholy stone.'

Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country
churchyards--'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the
sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out
by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons
do not look with favour upon them, besides which--to use a clumsy
phrase--besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against
burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:

'I'll stay and read my sermon here,
And skulls and bones shall be my text.

* * * *

Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,