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



An epitaph was repeated to me once by the late Mr. Charles 

 Pearson, the author of ' National Life and Character,' as having been 

 placed or proposed to be placed on the tomb of one who was like 

 himself a Fellow of Oriel, Mr. Charles Marriott, so well known in 

 connection with the earlier part of the Oxford Movement. It seemed 

 to me very striking in spite of its peculiar Latinity : — 



Exutus morte 



Hie licet in occiduo cinere 



Aspicit eum 



Cujus nouien est Oriens. 

 Freed from death 

 Tlio' in ashes that vanish away, 

 He looketh upon him 

 Whose came is " the Rising." 



Very beautiful and very characteristic of the man at his best, i& 

 the epitaph which Newman composed for himself : — 

 Ex umhris et imaginibus in veritatem. 

 Out of shadows and images into the Truth. 



Dr. Johnson, as is well known, had the most rooted objection to 

 English epitaphs, and insisted, in spite of the respectful remonstrances 

 of a most distinguished group of friends, in writing the epitaph upon 

 Goldsmith in Latin. His obstinacy in a bad cause had, however, the 

 incidental effect of giving us the happy phrase which many suppose 

 to have come down from classical antiquity : — 



Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. 



He touched nothing which he did not adorn. 



To another writer of the last century, to Shenstone, we owe the 

 equally famous words which formed part of the epitaph of a young 

 lady : — 



O quanto minus est 



Cum aliis versari 



Quam tui meminisse. 



O how much less it is to live with others than to remember thee. 



Again, however, tho clock warns me to pass to another branch of 

 my subject, but before doing so I should like to say that I wish 

 some one who had eyes, leisure and enthusiasm would go through 

 Mommsen's inscriptions and the far less gigantic but still huge work 

 of Morcelli, and Murray's handbooks (which have swept into their 

 pages so much that is interesting and that cannot easily be found 

 elsewhere), with a view to giving us a small volume containing only 

 the most beautiful Latin epitaphs. 



We may turn now to our own language. The last Lord de Tabley, 

 one of the most accomplished of men, used to remark on the extra- 

 ordinary difficulty of writing an epitaph in English about a common- 

 place life," like those touching ones of commonplace life which, as he 

 said, draw one's very heart out in Latin in the first few centuries." 



