16 Bight Hon. Sir M. E. Grant Buff [Jan. 27, 



I need not say that I am not going to attempt a dissertation upon 

 epitaphs when two such eminent men have failed. All I shall 

 attempt to do is to bring together as many quite first-rate epitaphs 

 as time will permit, avoiding some of those which are best known, 

 and connecting those I shall cite with each other as well as I can. 

 If by that means I can give, to those who have honoured me by their 

 presence, an agreeable hour, my highest ambition will be satisfied. 



In most collections of epitaphs a great many pages are given to 

 comic ones. Such things are quite harmless when they are merely 

 written to pass from mouth to mouth and with no intention of 

 engraving them on a tomb, but those persons who spend their time 

 in painfully collecting and carefully publishing in books the rubbish 

 which is often to be found in country churchyards do a serious 

 disservice to such of their fellow-creatures as have the misfortune to 

 read them. They should be condemned to employ a sort of Old 

 Mortality Reversed to go through the land chipping off the stones 

 the trash which they have copied, paying all the fines their agent 

 incurs in the process. 



Perhaps the most amusing of comic epitaphs is one which cir- 

 culates as that of Lady O'Looney, and is commonly said to have 

 been copied from a tomb in Pewsey churchyard. That, however, is 

 not the case, for in a work on epitaphs by Mr. Ravenshaw, who dates 

 from Pewsey Rectory, I find that it is a version, mutilated for 

 conversational purposes, of a long epitaph from St. George's burying 

 ground in London on a certain Mrs. Jane Molony. The original is, 

 Heaven knows, sufficiently absurd, and nearly all the current version 

 has been picked out of it, but it contains a great deal of additional 

 matter chiefly of a genealogical character. 



Lord Holland said to Mr. Charles Greville in 1830, that " there 

 is hardly such a thing in the world as a good house or a good epitaph, 

 and yet mankind have been employed in building the former and 

 writing the latter since the beginning almost." 



I propose to deal exclusively with those epitaphs which deserve 

 to be covered by the word " hardly " in this judgment. 



When I determined to address you on this subject, my first 

 endeavour was to find out whether the great ancient civilisations of 

 Assyria, Babylonia or Egypt had bequeathed anything to us in the 

 shape of epitaphs. After applying to the best authority I have not 

 been able to find that the two first mentioned have done so. From 

 a paper, however, published under the title of ' Egyptian Steke 

 principally of the Eighteenth Dynasty,' by Mr. Budge of the British 

 Museum, aud kindly lent to me by him, I gather that " the custom of 

 the Ancient Egyptians of erecting sepulchral stclse in honour of their 

 deceased kings, nobles, persons of rank, relatives and friends, has 

 proved a most valuable aid to the modern student of the Egyptian 

 language, and has enabled him to learn much of the social life of 

 the Egyptian which would otherwise have passed away in oblivion." 



No doubt this is so, and the specimens which Mr. Budge gives are 



