’I’ll stay and read my sermon here,
And skulls and bones shall be my text.

* * * *

Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,
That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love and all we hate,
That all we hope and all we fear,
Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
Must end in dust and silence here.’

The best epitaphs are the grim ones.  Designed, as epitaphs are, to arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once, and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death and, it may be, judgment to come.

Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting Selection of English Epigrams and Epitaphs, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country.  The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean.  It is admirably suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four: 

’When the Archangel’s trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Many will wish their lives below
Had been as short as mine.’

It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.

Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is arrested by Pope’s well-known lines from his magnificent ’Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,’ which are often to be found on tombstones: 

’So peaceful rests without a stone and name
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. 
How loved, how honoured once avails thee not,
To whom related or by whom begot. 
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
‘Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.’

I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope’s claim to be a poet no worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was denied them—­the ear of the public.

Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which remind the passer-by of his transitory estate.  In different parts of the country—­in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray—­are to be found lines more or less resembling the following: 

’Man’s life is like unto a winter’s day,
Some break their fast and so depart away,
Others stay dinner then depart full fed,
The longest age but sups and goes to bed. 
O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.’

The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases.  To lie like a tombstone has become a proverb.  Pope’s famous epitaph on Newton: 

’Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.’