EPITAPHS.

Where we are, or are not, understood. It is as follows:

Live well, die never,

Die well, and live for ever.

Many wretched conceits, middling jokes, obscure compliments, as well as innumerable lies, are cut in stone. The following, on a child six months old, will be found at Brighton:

He tasted of life's bitter cup,
Refused to drink the potion up;
But turn'd his little head aside,
Disgusted with the taste, and died.

THERE is a humble, unpretending yard, Surrey, seems to be composed kind of poetry, limited in its subject on the judicious precept of Butler: -the production alike of the learned For brevity is very good, and the ignorant, the high and low, the rich and poor-which, alike interesting to all, has failed to obtain much regard from those to whom it addresses instruction: I mean Epitaphs. The living naturally wish to shun all intercourse with the dead; and though the latter, in many a warning line, lift up their voice, and call aloud from the ground, we heed not the posthumous counsel, but tread over the gravel, or the green sod, which covers our ancestor's dust, without even whistling to keep our courage up. In the course of a long and busy life, I have read many epitaphs in various parts of England; and, though many of these are the avowed productions of men of learning and genius, yet by far the greatest number, like the songs of the peasantry, are the production of humble and nameless persons. have not failed to observe, that the inscriptions which spoke the plainest sense, expressed the happiest sentiments, contained the richest poetry, and gave the most original and vivid portraiture of past beauty or worth, were generally the works of obscure persons, whose names are unknown to literature; and who, probably both before and after, sought no intercourse with the muse. I shall only transcribe now a few of these epitaphs, which seem not generally known, and confine myself rather to the curious than the beautiful. The following very simple and affecting epitaph expresses more in few words than we usually observe in this kind of composition:

Nineteen years a maiden,
One year a wife,
One hour a mother,

And so I lost my life.

I

The brevity of the following is of a different nature, and approaches too close to the epigrammatic:

Life is uncertain, death is sure;
Sin is the wound, and Christ the cure.

An inscription in Kingston church

Those who die at peace with the world, and leave rich legacies to their relations, commonly come in for a very reasonable share of good qualities in their epitaphs. There is some bitterness contained in two lines on a tomb-stone at Pentonville: Death takes the good-too good on earth to stay, And leaves the bad-too bad to take away.

An inscription at Islington is in better taste and gentler feeling. It is on a child some months old; and, brief as it is, contains a fine sentiment:

Here virtue sleeps-restrain the pious tear!
He waits that judgment which he cannot

fear.

The good people of Newcastle seem a facetious generation; and it is a blessing worth coveting, to die in their neighbourhood, should the bard still live who wrote this epitaph : Here lies Robin Wallis, the king of good fellows,

Clerk of Allhallows, and a maker of bellows;

He bellows did make to the day of his death;

But he that made bellows, could never make breath.

Forty-two years the Almighty gave me power

To aid my sex in nature's trying hour; Through heat and cold, by day, by dreary night,

To save the hapless was my chief delight; My toils are past: my weeping friends, adieu!

I'm call'd to Heaven, and hope to welcome you.

Honest Stephen Rumbold, of Oxford, is thus briefly remembered:

He lived one hundred and five,
Sanguine and strong;
An hundred to five

You live not so long.

In the epitaph on a Marine at Chichester, the writer has made an adroit turn from mortal to spiritual warfare. There are many military inscriptions scattered about the country, but few of them are very happy Here lies a true soldier, whom all must applaud;

Much hardship he suffer'd at home and
abroad;

But the hardest engagement he ever was in,
Was the battle of Self in the conquest of
Sin.

A soldier died suddenly in Hampshire from drinking small beer after a hot march, and this is his epitaph: Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire grenadier,

Who caught his death by drinking cold

small beer.

Soldiers, be wise, from his untimely fall; And when you're hot, drink strong, or none at all.

The following ludicrous addition was made by the officers in garrison when they restored the decayed mo

Plain in their form, but rich they were in mind:

Religious, quiet, honest, meek, and kind.

Nor do I dislike the lines on Sophia
Bovil, a child of two years old:
Rest soft thy dust, wait the Almighty's
will,

Rise with the just, and be an angel still.

The following ludicrous verse, though none of the happiest, happens to be a recent production :

Here fast asleep, full six feet deep,
And seventy summers ripe,
George Thomas lies in hopes to rise,
And smoke another pipe.

It was almost one of the last acts

of Horne Tooke to cause a vault to be made in his garden, surmounted he wrote the following inscription, by a slab of black marble, for which and caused it to be engraved with directions that his executors should fill up the blank:

late

John Horne Tooke, proprietor, now occupier of this spot, born in 1736, died in

Contented and grateful.

in his own garden was not complied His singular request to be buried with: he was interred at Ealing; the tomb-stone was removed from the garden, the old inscription effaced, and its place supplied by an epitaph from another hand.

In the church-yard of Bayswater, left hand, leaning against the wall, mid-way down the ground on the obscured by nettles and rank grass, unnoticed, and perhaps unknown, stands a rude memorial of common rough stone, indebted to no gifted and cunning hand for beauty of form, and to no elegant mind for the inscription with which it is covered. It is the tomb-stone of Laurence Sterne. remembered in the church-yard of who are so patriotic, so witty, when Perhaps his countrymen Hythe:

nument:

An honest soldier never is forgot,
Whether he died by musket or by pot.

An old fisherman of Kent is thus

His net old fisher George long drew,
Shoals upon shoals he caught,
Till Death came hauling for his due,
And made poor George his draught.
Death fishes on through various shades;
In vain it is to fret;
Nor fish or fisherman escapes

Death's all-enclosing net.

I like the unassuming epitaph of John and Martha Wright; it says much in small space:

the wine is good, so affectionate in their remembrances, so fond of numbering Sterne among those steady lights which contribute to the fixed splendour of Ireland, may reflect, while they laugh and wonder, and weep over his pages, that he sleeps among the vulgar dead, and have the grace to propose to honour themselves by erecting a monument to his memory. That the noble, the wealthy, the witty, and the gay, left the interment

of Sterne and the erection of his grave-stone, to mechanics and strangers, is a reproach that can never be removed.

Near this place lies the body of The Reverend Laurence Sterne, A. M. Died Sept. 13, 1768, aged 53 years. This monumental stone was erected to the memory of the deceased by two brother Masons; for although he did not live to be a member of their society, yet all his

MÉDITATIONS POÉTIQUES, PAR THESE poems have been much read and admired in France. The copy that lies before us bears the fourth edition on its title-page. Those that preceded it, we are informed, appeared also in the course of last year, and several more have since followed. The author is said to be a very amiable man, who, in his complaints that death has bereaved him of the object of his tenderest affections, and that he has been himself on the brink of the grave, does not impose on the commiseration of his readers by the recital of imaginary evils. It will, therefore, we trust, not be unwelcome information to them, if we add, that he has not only been restored to health, but is fortunate enough to be now united to one of our own country women, who has had the discernment to perceive and reward his merit, and that he has been sent out as secretary to the French embassy at Naples.

Whenever, in these "Poetical Meditations," as he calls them, the writer expresses what appear to be his own unpremeditated thoughts, and spontaneous feelings, without forcing himself into a state of excitement for the occasion, he is, for the most part, very pleasing. In some of his altitudes, it must be owned, we have

followed him with much less satisfaction. Thus, in the first poem, where he describes himself seated on an eminence, at the foot of an old oak, "watching with wistful gaze the setting sun:

Au sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois
sombres,

Le crépuscule encor jette un dernier rayon,
Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres
Monte, et blanchit déja les bords de l'horizon.

Here he is placed, and employed exactly as a young poet of his disposition ought to be. But when in the following meditation, addressed to Lord Byron, he compares his Lordship to an eagle launching forth from the horrible summit of Mount Athos, and suspending his aerie over the abyss that yawns at its side; where, surrounded with palpitating limbs, and with rocks incessantly dripping with black gore, delighted with the shrieks of his prey, and, cradled by the tempest, he falls to sleep in his joy;

L'aigle, roi des déserts, dédaigne ainsi la

*

plaine;

Lui, des sommets d'Athos franchit l'horrible cime,

Suspend aux flancs des monts son aire sur
l'abyme,

Et là, seul, entouré de membres palpitans,
De rochers d'un sang noir sans cesse dé-

gouttans,

Trouvant sa volupté dans les cris de sa proie,

Bercé par la tempête, il s'endort dans sa joie ;