pt
Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably Carlyle
would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they
had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even
Somerset. These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in
the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being
most numerous. Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here
you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson,
provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or
Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains,
majors, and colonels. There were hundreds more whose professions
or occupations in life were not stated. There were also hundreds of
memorials to ladies--widows and spinsters. They were all, in fact,
to persons who had come to die in Bath after "taking the waters," and
dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls
of the abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His early virtues,
his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to
his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and
happiness. These prospects have all faded," and so on for several long
lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath? He was
a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his
mother, coming to Bath for her health, "caused this inscription to
be placed on the abbey walls"! If this policy or tradition is still
followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to
build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far
to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which
ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and
placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons
described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of
memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin,
the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever
written. No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with
me for quoting them here:

That tong