The low and roomy building, in places green with damp, is paved with mutilated ledger-stones, whose fragments have long ago suffered what seems to be an abiding divorce, so that disjointed invocations, and sacred names, and gruesome injunctions to “Prepare for Death,” start into being as you pace the floor. Here, too, more than in any other place, do people seem moved to verse in commemorating their departed friends, not infrequently casting their elegies in the first person, so that the dead of Talland appear to a casual observer to be the most conceited and egotistical of corpses. Of this type, the following epitaph is perhaps the most striking:-- “ERECTED to the memory of ROBERT MARK; late of Polperro, who Unfortunately was _shot at Sea_ the 24^{th} day of Jan^y in the Year of our LORD GOD 1802, in the 40^{th} Year of His AGE. In prime of Life most suddenly, Sad tidings to relate; Here view My utter destiny, And pity My sad state: I by a shot, which Rapid flew, Was instantly struck dead; LORD pardon the Offender who, My precious blood did shed. Grant Him to rest and forgive Me, All I have done amiss; And that I may Rewarded be, With Euerlasting Bliss.” Now, this Robert Mark was a smuggler. He was at the helm of a boat which had been obliged to run before a revenue cutter, and the boat was at the point of escaping when the cutters crew opened fire, killing him on the spot. But the most curious of all the epitaphs within the church of Talland is that engraved on the monument to “John Bevyll of Kyllygath.” The monument is an imposing edifice of slate, in the south aisle, with a figure of John Bevyll, habited in a curious Elizabethan costume, carved in somewhat high relief on top. The verses are the more curious, in that they employ archaic heraldic terms, now little known. They set out by describing the Bevyll arms, “A Rubye Bull in Perle Filde”--that is to say, in modern heraldry, a _Bull gules in a field argent_:--