Page 16 - Graveyard

14 | G r av e y ar d H u m o r

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the living, and in a letter to Mr. Coleridge, dated October 23 , 1802, says,
“When men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing in
their epitaphs whether they had been wise or silly in their lifetime.” We
love to dwell on all that he has said on this subject, for there is always a
heartiness about his expressions. Of his fine feelings and chaste words the
following is an example. In a letter to Mr. Manning he sent an epitaph
which he scribbled over on a “poor girl, who died at nineteen, a good girl,
and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely neglected by all her
friends:”—

Under this cold marble stone
Sleep the sad remains of one
Who, when alive, by few or none
Was loved, as loved she might have been,
If she prosperous days had seen,
Or had thriving been, I ween.
Only this cold funeral stone
Tells she was beloved by one
Who on the marble graves his moan.

Women sometimes wish for an opportunity to be revenged on their
husbands. As an example of this we may relate that the wife of a man
named Baldwin, of Lymington, Hampshire, had made a vow “ to dance
over his grave”—they had not lived happily together. To defeat her design
Baldwin left special instructions that his body should be sunk in the sea in
Scratchall’s Bay, off the Needles, Isle of Wight; and it appears his body was
th
so disposed of on the 20 May, 1736, as the parochial register of
Lymington records.
Many epitaphs are repeated in different churchyards; and as to
“Affliction sore long time I bore,” the writer does not know where it is not
to be found, as many as a dozen copies of it having been found in some
churchyards. The blacksmith’s epitaph: “My sledge and hammer lie
declined,” may be found in Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight, Felpham in Sussex,
Westham in Essex, Chipping Sodbury, and Houghton, Hunts. “She was
but reason forbids me to say what,” although a strange verse for a
gravestone, is to be found in several places—as Monkwearmouth,
Swansea, Clerkenwell, Lambeth, and Bolton. (See Nos. 4, 189, 292, 329,
and 337.)