Epitaphy

It is desyred that where, of long tyme agoo, in the said chapell, a knight and his wife (were) buried, and their pictures upon theym very sore worne and broken, that they may take away the pictures, and lay in the place a playn stone, with an epitaphy who is there buried, that the people may make setts and pewys, where they may more quietly serve God, and that it may less cowmber the rowme.

And after in that ſomer, he wrote an epitaphy in latin, and cauſed it to be written vpõ his tombe of ſtone, which himſelf (while he was lord Chãceller) had cauſed to be made in his pariſhe church of Chelſey (where he dwelled) thre smal Miles frõ London. The copye of which epitaphy here foloweth.

And Paula the nobleſt of all the Women of Rome, (g) which having deſpiſed all her greatneſſe and Riches, that ſhe might wholly give her ſelf up to Chriſt, travelled to Bethlehem about the year 384. as Hieronymus writes in her Epitaphy, who himſelf living in the ſame place filled the whole World with the fame of his great Learning and Piety.

One or two of them are curious specimens of epitaphy.

If one were to execute a line of cleavage that would broadly cut into two sections the work of the six' centuries of statuaries from Henry III. down to our own day, that line might fall within the later days of Elizabeth, and the basis of division would be established according to the manipulation of language for purposes of “epitaphy.”

The last words are placed within quotation marks so that Dr. Lowder is perhaps not entitled to the glory of one of the nicest “derangements of epitaphy” we have ever met with.

Imaginative epitaphy is no new thing.

Ignored, in many cases, far too long, the chief attention these stalwart reminders of worthy lives have had has been on occasional visit of a curious stranger, often to smile at some odd stroke of epitaphy, some humble verse or some queer touch of sculpture that to the unthinking seems grotesque.