but indifferently employed, and the inference is that the clergy have in times past been wofully ignorant or lamentably careless as to their powers and obligations.  A more healthy system now prevails, and we seldom or never find anything in the way of ornament, emblem, or inscription of an offensive or ridiculous character placed in any of our burial-grounds, the Burial Boards being as strict and watchful over the cemeteries as the rectors and vicars are in the management of the churchyards.  Nor has there been, so far as we have gone, any difficulty in reconciling this stringency of supervision with the Acts of Parliament which have been passed in recognition of religious equality at the grave; and it is not too much to hope that there is in the present day such universal prevalence of good taste and propriety under the solemnity of death as to ensure concurrence among all sects and parties in securing decorum in all things relating to interments.  To the incongruities which have been left to us as legacies from our ancestors we may be indulgent.  They are landmarks of the generations which created them, and records of times and manners which we would fain believe that we have left behind in these days of better education and better thought.  They are therefore of value to us as items of history, and, though we would not repeat many of them, we shall preserve them, not only because we reverence the graves of our forefathers, but because they are entitled to our protection as ancient monuments.  However uncouth they may be in design or expression, they must be tolerated for their age.  It cannot be denied that some of them try our patience, in the epitaphs even more perhaps than in the carvings, and “merely mock whom they were meant to honour.”  Two out of a vast number may be selected as painful evidences of a departed century’s tombstone ribaldry.  The first, from a village near Bath, is a deplorable mixture of piety and profanity, sentiment and vulgarity: 

“To the memory of Thomas and Richard Fry, stonemasons, who were crushed to death, Aug. the 25th, 1776, by the slipdown of a wall they were in the act of building.  Thomas was 19 and Richard 21 years.

    “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death
    were not divided.

    “Blessed are they that die in the Lord, for their works follow
    them.

    “A sacred Truth:  now learn our awful fate.

  “Dear Friends, we were first cousins, and what not: 
  To toil as masons was our humble lot. 
  As just returning from a house of call,
  The parson bade us set about his wall. 
  Flush’d with good liquor, cheerfully we strove
  To place big stones below and big above;
  We made too quick work—­down the fabric came;
  It crush’d our vitals:  people call’d out shame! 
  But we heard nothing, mute as fish we lay,
  And shall lie sprawling till the judgment day. 
  From our misfortune this good moral know—­
  Never to work too fast nor drink too slow.”