FIG. 86.—­AT HIGH BARNET.

I conclude my English illustrations of the gravestones with one selected from the churchyard at Kingston-on-Thames, and I leave its interpretation to the reader.

[Illustration:  Fig. 86.  High Barnet.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 87.  Kingston-on-Thames.]

Fig. 87.—­At Kingston-on-Thames.

“To Thomas Bennett, died 7th Dec. 1800,
aged 13 years.”

The remainder of my unambitious book will be mostly devoted to impressions gained in Ireland and Scotland and on the Continent in my autumn holidays.

CHAPTER X.

Old gravestones in Ireland.

[Illustration:  Fig. 88.  Swords.]

In entering upon a chapter dealing with “Old Gravestones in Ireland,” one is tempted to follow a leading case and sum up the subject in the words:  “There are no old gravestones in Ireland.”  But this would be true only in a sense.  Of those primitive and rustic carvings, which are so distinctive of the eighteenth-century memorials in England, I have found an almost entire absence in my holiday-journey ings about Ireland—­the churchyards of which I have sampled, wherever opportunity was afforded me, from Belfast and Portrush in the north, down to Killarney and Queenstown in the south.  But there are unquestionably old gravestones of quite a different order of simplicity in the Irish burial-places, the most common type being the rough slab of stone, several of which are here sketched at random from the graveyard of the large village or little town of Swords, ten miles or so north of Dublin (Fig. 88).  Very few of these stones bear any inscription, and, according to the belief of the local residents, never have been carved or even shaped in any way.  In one or two instances, however, the effort of trimming the edges of the stone is clearly visible, and in rare cases we see the pious but immature attempts of the amateur mason to perpetuate, if only by initials, the memory of the deceased.[10] Some such records still remain, but many have doubtless perished, for the material is only the soft freestone so easily obtainable in the district, and the rains and frosts of no great number of years have sufficed to obliterate all such shallow carvings; the surfaces of the laminated rock being even now in process of peeling off before our eyes.

[Footnote 10:  In a barren record of facts, such as this chapter is meant to be, I avoid as far as possible deductions and reflections apart from my immediate subject; but it is impossible to pursue an investigation of this character without being deeply interested both in the past history and present life of the people.  I cannot help saying that in one day’s walk from Malahide to Balbriggan I learnt