d goes to bed.
O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.'

The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has
become a proverb. Pope's famous epitaph on Newton:

'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'

is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to
honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the
preference given to prose Latinity.

The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either
insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:

'UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.

Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.'

Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called _The
Epigrammatists_, published in Bohn's Standard Library, calls these
lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are
very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must
remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson's beautiful epitaph on S.P., a
child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, beginning,

'Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed
Death's self is sorry,'

is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those
sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay's, for
example:

'Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.'

But _does_ he know it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity
is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the
English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in
the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a striking
exception:

'Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame,
He ask'd and hoped through Christ. Do thou