In this little churchyard a chapter or two of history and progress is easily seen. At the middle of the eighteenth century the sexton wrote the epitaphs, dealing out eulogy and fact with a generous hand. After him came a series of nonentities, whose epitaphs are as like one another as Windsor chairs. Honest regret, or “smiling through tears,” was ousted by complacent joy at the celestial lot of the deceased. Decent friendship was replaced by encomiastic fraud. Like all fashions it was feeble, but like all fashions it had some good; it produced models of accurate expression of “not what he was, but what he should have been.” Then in the nineteenth century followed a silent age. “He was alive, and is dead;” tombstones with such inscriptions are like men who do not speak in company, and unlike them, they never disappoint. They say, at anyrate, not more than is written of honest men in heaven. The children of those silent people did little but irrelevantly quote or paraphrase the Bible and Dr. Watts. The epitaphs were now thought worthy of a clear, large type; the fashion at least taught children to spell. Some there were who gained no small village reputation by a diligent study of these sentences. Even the wiser pillars of the village, whether they could read or not, were sure of awe and admiration among their audience, if their speeches--political, religious, or scandalous--were launched by “As the great Dr. Watts wrote ...” or “In the words of Amos, whom you may know....” Not of this period, but first notorious then, was the epitaph on Sir ----, Bart. His family, being still one of splendour and influence, everything connected with it was held in esteem. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the admirers of an aged spinster should put upon her tomb the epitaph that was picked out with letters of gold on that of the young baronet--
Strangers are apt to wonder first at the longevity common in the parish--then at the humour of the thing--and go away both contented and deceived. For some time it was not uncommon to quote a grave passage from Shakespeare, with decent omission of the author’s name; when, however, a revolutionist not only published “Shakespeare” on a headstone, but “Romeo and Juliet” too, the vicar was approached, the sexton ran a risk every day, the inn-keeper, the J.P. was approached. The bereaved person had in the meantime erased the offending words, and until recently you might read--