Life's but a snare, a Labyrinth of Woe Which wretched Man is doomed to struggle through. To-day he's great, to-morrow he's undone, And thus with Hope and Fear he blunders on, Till some disease, or else perhaps old Age Calls us poor Mortals trembling from the Stage. An amusing variant of one of the commoner forms of that time appears at Lelant, a Cornish village near St. Ives: What now you are so once was me, What now I am that you will be, Therefore prepare to follow me. No less remarkable in grammar as in the identical or perfect rhyme in the first and third lines. The author or adapter could have escaped this by making the two first the expression of the person buried beneath, and the third the comment from the outsider, as follows: Therefore prepare to follow _she_, It was a woman, I must say. This form of epitaph is quite common, and I need not give here more examples from my notes, but the better convention coming down from the preceding age goes on becoming more and more modified all through the eighteenth, and even to the middle of the nineteenth century. The following from St. Erth, a Cornish village, is a most suitable inscription on the grave of an old woman who was a nurse in the same family from 1750 to 1814: Time rolls her ceaseless course; the race of yore That danced our infancy on their knee And told our wondering children Legends lore Of strange adventures haped by Land and Sea, How are they blotted from the things that be! There are many beautiful stones and appropriate inscriptions during all that long period, in spite of the advent of Mr. Buggins and his ugliness, and the charm and pathos is often in a phrase, a single line, as in this from St. Keverne, 1710, a widow's epitaph on her husband: Rest here awhile, thou dearest part of me. But let us now get back another century at a jump, to the Jacobean and Caroline period. And for these one must look as a rule in interiors, seeing that, where exposed to the weather, the lettering, if not the whole stone, has perished. Perhaps the best specimen of the grave inscription, lofty but not pompous, of that age which I have met with is on a tablet in Ripon Cathedral to Hugh de Ripley, a locally important man who died in 1637: