It was a pleasant thought thus to renew the memory of departed friends by flagon, and plate, and alms-basin--a wiser way, one feels, than the carving of long epitaphs on gloomy stones surmounted by skull and cross-bones. How often, as we read these dreary tributes, we long for some shock of truth to nature, among all this decorous conventionalism! What tales these old colonial graveyards might have told us if they would! Here lie men who, perchance, supped with Shakespeare, or jested with Jonson and Marlow at _The Mermaid_. Here rest gallants who closed round the royal standard on the fatal field of Marston Moor, or danced at Buckingham Palace with the free and fair dames of the merry court of Charles Second after the Restoration; but not a word of all this appears on the stones that represent them. Their epitaphs plaster them over with all the Christian virtues, and obscure their individuality as completely as the whitewash brushes of Cromwell's soldiers obliterated the dark, quaintly carved oak of the cathedrals. _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_ makes churchyard literature very dull reading, when it should be the most interesting and instructive in the world. Had the stones set forth the lives of those who rest beneath, we might learn much of such a man as Sir George Somers, whose strange experiences on the _Sea-Venture_ and his adventures on the Bermudas make me want to know more of him. I want to know what caused the trouble between him and Gates; how he built his cedar ships; how he looked, and walked, and talked; and what manner of man he was, all in all. Instead of gratifying my innocent curiosity, his tombstone in Whitchurch, where he is buried, puts me off with a florid verse of poor poetry, and I am little better helped when I turn to the records of the island where he died. Here Capt. Nathaniel Butler, "finding accidentally" (so runs the old chronicle) "a little crosse erected in a by-place amongst a great many of bushes, understanding there was buried the heart and intrailes of Sir George Somers, hee resolved to have a better memory of so worthy a Souldier than that. So, finding also a great Marble Stone brought out of England, hee caused it to bee wrought handsomely, and laid over the place, which he invironed with a square wall of hewen stone, tombe-like, wherein hee caused to be graven this epitaph he had composed, and fixed it on the Marble Stone and thus it was: "In the year 1611 Noble Sir George Summers went hence to Heaven Whose noble, well-tried worth that held him still imploid Gave him the knowledge of the world so wide. Hence 't was by heavens decree that to this place He brought new guests and name to mutual grace. At last his soule and body being to part, He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart."