To the memory of LUCY LYTTLETON, Daughter &c. who departed this
     life &c. aged 20._ Having employed the short time assigned to her
     here in the uniform practice of religion and virtue_.

    Made to engage all hearts, and charm all eyes,
    Though meek, magnanimous; though witty, wise;
    Polite, as all her life in Courts had been;
    Yet good, as she the world had never seen;
    The noble fire of an exalted mind,
    With gentle female tenderness combined. 
    Her speech was the melodious voice of love,
    Her song the warbling of the vernal grove;
    Her eloquence was sweeter than her song,
    Soft as her heart, and as her reason strong;
    Her form each beauty of the mind express’d,
    Her mind was Virtue by the Graces drest.

The prose part of this inscription has the appearance of being intended for a tomb-stone; but there is nothing in the verse that would suggest such a thought.  The composition is in the style of those laboured portraits in words which we sometimes see placed at the bottom of a print to fill up lines of expression which the bungling Artist had left imperfect.  We know from other evidence that Lord Lyttleton dearly loved his wife; he has indeed composed a monody to her memory which proves this, and she was an amiable woman; neither of which facts could have been gathered from these inscriptive verses.  This epitaph would derive little advantage from being translated into another style as the former was; for there is no under current; no skeleton or staminae of thought and feeling.  The Reader will perceive at once that nothing in the heart of the Writer had determined either the choice, the order or the expression, of the ideas; that there is no interchange of action from within and from without; that the connections are mechanical and arbitrary, and the lowest kind of these—­heart and eyes:  petty alliterations, as meek and magnanimous, witty and wise, combined with oppositions in thoughts where there is no necessary or natural opposition.  Then follow voice, song, eloquence, form, mind—­each enumerated by a separate act as if the Author had been making a Catalogue Raisonne.

These defects run through the whole; the only tolerable verse is,

    Her speech was the melodious voice of love.

Observe, the question is not which of these epitaphs is better or worse; but which faults are of a worse kind.  In the former case we have a mourner whose soul is occupied by grief and urged forward by his admiration.  He deems in his simplicity that no hyperbole can transcend the perfections of her whom he has lost; for the version which I have given fairly demonstrates that, in spite of his outrageous expressions, the under current of his thoughts was natural and pure.  We have therefore in him the example of a mind during the act of composition misled by false taste to the highest possible degree; and, in that of Lord Lyttleton,