Page:A tour through the northern counties of England, and the borders of Scotland - Volume I.djvu/88

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its widowhood alone; its strong hold is the heart, there it remains close curtained—unseeing, unseen. Delicacy and taste recoil at the publication of internal griefs. They prophane the hallowedness of secret sadness; and suppose selected and decorated expression compatible with the prostration of the soul. No man will give Lord Lyttelton credit for those feelings towards his first love, which the polished lines of his elegy breathe, who adverts to the circumstances and character of his second. But this composition was not the only poetical tribute to the memory of Lucy from the pen of his Lordship. The following Latin and English epitaphs upon her monument in Hagley church are succeeded by some laudatory lines in the highest strain of eulogium:

"M. S.
LUCIÆ LYTTELTON,
Ex antiquissimorum Fortescutorum generc ortæ
Quæ annos nata viginti novem,
Fornix eximiac, indolis optimæ,
Ingenii maximi,
Omnibus bonis artibus literisque
humanioribus supra ætatcm et sexum exculti, sine superbia laude florens, mortw immatura, vitam pie, pudice, sancte actarn; in tcrtio puerperio

sancte actam; in tertio puerperio calusit, decimo nono die Januarii, anno Domini 1746-7; fleta ctiam ab ignotis. Uxori dilectissimo quinquennio fclicissimo conjugii nondum absoluti, immensi amoris ac desiderii hoc qualicumque monumentum posuit Georgius Lyttelton, adhue