Others seek titles to their tombs Thy deeds to thy name prove new wombes And scutcheons to deck their Herse Which thou need'st not like teares and vers. If I should praise thy thriving witt Or thy weighed judgment serving it Thy even and thy like straight ends Thy pitie to God and to friends The last would still the greatest be And yet all jointly less than thee. Thou studiedst conscience more than fame Still to thy gathered selfe the same. Thy gold was not thy saint nor welth Purchased by rapine worse than stealth Nor did'st thou brooding on it sit Not doing good till death with it. This many may blush at when they see What thy deeds were what theirs should be. Thou'st gone before and I wait now T'expect my when and wait my how Which if my Jesus grant like thine Who wets my grave's no friend of mine. Rather too long for my chapter, but I quote it for the sake of the last four lines, characteristic of that period, the age of conceits, of the love of fantasticalness, of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan. A jump from Ripon of 600 odd miles to the little village of Ludgvan, near Penzance, brings us to a tablet of nearly the same date, 1635, and an inscription conceived in the same style and spirit. It is interesting, on account of the name of Catherine Davy, an ancestress of the famous Sir Humphry, whose marble statue stands before the Penzance Market House facing Market Jew Street. Death shall not make her memory to rott Her virtues were too great to be forgott. Heaven hath her soul where it must still remain The world her worth to blazon forth her fame The poor relieved do honour and bless her name. Earth, Heaven, World, Poor, do her immortalize Who dying lives and living never dies. Here is another of 1640: Here lyeth the body of my Husband deare Whom next to God I did most love and fear. Our loves were single: we never had but one And so I'll be although that thou art gone. Which means that she has no intention of marrying again. Why have I set this inscription down? Solely to tell how I copied it. I saw it on a brass in the obscure interior of a small village church in Dorset, but placed too high up on the wall to be seen distinctly. By piling seven hassocks on top of one another I got high up enough to read the date and inscription, but before securing the name I had to get quickly down for fear of falling and breaking my neck. The hassocks had added five feet to my six. The convention of that age appears again in the following inscription from a tablet in Aldermaston church, in that beautiful little Berkshire village, once the home of the Congreves: Like borne, like new borne, here like dead they lie, Four virgin sisters decked with pietie Beauty and other graces which commend And made them like blessed in the end. Which means they were very much like each other, and were all as pure in heart as new-born babes, and that they all died unmarried.