“Born to a course of Manly action free,
  I dauntless trod ye fluctuating sea
  In Pompous War or happier Peace to bring
  Joy to my Sire and honour to my King. 
  And much by favour of the God was done
  Ere half the term of human life was run. 
      One fatal night, returning from the bay
  Where British fleets ye Gallic land survey,
  Whilst with warm hope my trembling heart beat high,
  My friends, my kindred, and my country nigh,
  Lasht by the winds the waves arose and bore
  Our Ship in shattered fragments to the shore. 
  There ye flak’d surge opprest my darkening sight,
  And there my eyes for ever lost the light.

  “Captain George Colvill of the Private Ship
      of War ‘Amazon,’ and only son of
      Robert Colvill of Bangor, was wrecked
      near this ground 25th February 1780, in
      ye 22nd year of his age.”

A possible explanation of the long endurance of this slate slab may be found in the practice which prevails in this and some other churchyards of giving all such memorials a periodical coat of paint; of which, however, in the case here quoted there is no remaining trace.

Altogether, primitive as they may be, the gravestones of the last century in Ireland, so far as I have seen them, compare favourably with the works of the hedge-mason in England which we have seen in earlier chapters.  Even the poor pillar of rough stone, unhewn, ungarnished, and bare as it is, represents an affectionate remembrance of the dead which is full of pathos, and has a refinement in its simplicity which commands our sympathy far above the semi-barbarous engravings of heads and skulls which we have previously pictured.  The immaturity of provincial art in Ireland is at least redeemed by an absence of such monstrous figures and designs as we at the present day usually associate with the carvings of savages in the African interior.

But the eighteenth-century gravestones in Ireland are not all of the primitive kind—­many of them being as artistic and well-finished as any to be found in other parts of the British Isles.  The predominant type is the “I.H.S.,” surmounted by the cross, which appears on probably four-fifths of the inscribed stones of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ireland.  The only instances which came under my notice bearing any resemblance to the incipient notions of human heads so frequently met with in certain parts of England were the three here copied (Fig. 91).  Nos. 2 and 3 are taken from gravestones in the old churchyard near Queenstown, and the other appears in duplicate on one stone at Muckross Abbey by the Lakes of Killarney.[11] The stately wreck of Muckross Abbey has in its decay enclosed within its walls the tombs of knights and heroes whose monuments stand in gorgeous contrast to the desolation which is mouldering around them; while on the south side of the ancient edifice is the graveyard in which the peasant-fathers of the hamlet sleep, the green mounds which cover them in some instances marked by carved stones taken from the adjacent ruins.  Both Abbey and grounds are still used for interments, together with the enclosure about the little church of Killaghie on the neighbouring eminence—­a church which (like a few others) enjoys the reputation of being the smallest in the kingdom.