Soon, especially if man is to be allowed to help Time in the work of obliteration, quaint and interesting epitaphs will only be discoverable in books; perhaps better this than to be lost altogether, but I do not like my epitaphs served thus; I prefer to trace them for myself direct from the ancient tombstones, even though it entails a journey, time, and trouble to do this, for then I know they are genuine. I have an uneasy suspicion that the majority of clever and amusing epitaphs we find in books never came from tombstones at all, but owe their existence solely to the inventive faculties of various writers; I hope I am wrong, but my hoping does not prove me so! As an example of what I mean, I was reading a work the other day by a learned antiquary, in which I found quoted quite seriously the following droll epitaph—
Underneath this ancient pew
Lieth the body of Jonathan Blue,
His name was Black, but that wouldn't do,
with the information that it existed in a church in Berkshire. Now this really will not do, it is far too indefinite; I object to be sent epitaph-hunting all over a whole county; it would surely be as easy to give the name of the church as to state that it was somewhere "in Berkshire," which is suggestive of its being nowhere! Even when you know the precise locality of the church wherein is a quaint epitaph, it is not always easy to find the latter, as on one occasion I actually learnt from the clerk that an inscription that I had come a long way specially to
