Gleanings in Graveyards: A Collection of Curious EpitaphsNorfolk, Horatio Edward
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Gleanings in Graveyards: A Collection of Curious Epitaphs
Norfolk, Horatio Edward
Epitaphs; Epitaphs -- Great Britain
We lived one and twenty yeare,
Like man and wife together;
I could no longer have her heere,
She’s gone, I know not whither.
If I could guesse, I doe professe,
(I speak it not to flatter)
Of all the women in the worlde,
I never would come at her.
Her body is bestowed well,
A handsome grave doth hide her,
And sure her soule is not in hell,
The fiend could ne’er abide her.
I think she mounted up on hie,
For in the last great thunder,
Mee thought I heard her voice on hie,
Rending the clouds in sunder.
* * * * *
Within this place a vertvous virgin lies,
Much like those virgins that were counted wise,
Her lamp of life by Death being now pvt ovt,
Her lamp of grace doth still shine rovnd abovt,
And thovgh her body here doth sleep in clay,
Yet is her sovl still watchfvl for that day,
When Christ the Bridegroom of her sovl shall come,
To take her with him to the wedding roome.
* * * * *
Amy Mitchell,
1724 aged 19.
Here lies a virgin cropt in youth,
A Xtian both in name and truth,
Forbear to mourn, she is not dead,
But gone to marry Christ her head.
* * * * *
On a Woman who had three Husbands.
Here lies the body of Mary Sextone,
Who pleased three men, and never vexed one,
That she can’t say beneath the next stone.
* * * * *
Marianne S--.
Conjuge (i?) nunquam satis plorandæ
Inane hoc, tamen ultimum,
Amoris consecrat testimonium,
Maritus, heu! superstes.
The above Epitaph, inscribed on a plain marble tablet in a village church
near Bath, is one of the few in which the Latin language has been
employed with the brief and profound pathos of ancient sepulchral
inscriptions.
* * * * *
Short was her life,
Longer will be her rest;
Christ call’d her home,
Because he thought it best.
For she was born to die,
To lay her body down,
And young she did fly,
Into the world unknown.
5 years & 9 months.
* * * * *
Here lies my wife in earthly mould,
Who when she lived did naught but scold.
Peace! wake her not for now she’s still,
She _had_, but now _I_ have my will.
* * * * *
Epitaph written by Sarah Dobson, wife of John Dobson, to be put on her
tombstone after her decease:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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