330 



Gravestones^ 



is a vast amount of assumption in this sort of device, and in regarding 

 the gravestones of certain persons whom I have known, I have 

 thought that an asterisk would more correctly direct the thought. 

 Now I never see this upward pointing index finger without being re- 

 minded of a certain story, and as it was told me by a clergyman 

 there can certainly be no harm in my repeating it. In certain locali- 

 ties in I^ew England they have shops where they manufacture and 

 keep on hand for sale a stock of ready made gravestones with devices, 

 inscriptions and epitaphs suited to every occasion, and only lacking 

 the particular data, which are filled in to order. A farmer who had* 

 been deprived of his wife by death, wishing to show proper respect to 

 her memory, and also to save time, asked a neighbor who was driving 

 to market, to go to a shop of this description, and select for him a 

 handsome headstone for his wife, and at the same time gave him the 

 necessary data for completing the inscription. The neighbor per- 

 formed the errand, and in due course of time the stone was sent home 

 executed in the first style of the art, with a touching epitaph about 

 *' mother" at the bottom, and at the top a hand with the index fin- 

 ger pointing upward, and under it the words "no graves there," all 

 very appropriate apparently. But somehow it did not seem quite to 

 suit the purchaser, for the fact was that his surname and consequently 

 that of his deceased Avife, was — Graves! Prophetically, as well as 

 historically, it probably had an unpleasant significance. 



As to inscriptions they form a fertile subject of themselves^ and are 

 hardly within our province, but I may be allowed to offer one sugges- 

 tion — eschew conventionality and pedantry. Conventionality is 

 always unpleasant, but when associated with an affectation of learning 

 it becomes ridiculous. Mors janua vUcb" has been carved over 

 many a grave, but to me, it now only serves one purpose, and that is 

 to remind me of an anecdote of Lord Kenyon, who was always quoting 

 Latin incorrectly, and was very parsimonious. When his lordship 

 died, " mors janua vita'^ was displayed on the hatchment. This served 

 to emphasize his pedantry and his ignorance, but a wag of a law- 

 yer insisted that the misspelling was intentional on his lordship's part 

 in order to save the expense of the diphthong ! 



Every object in a Christian burying ground ought to be consonant 

 with the Christian faith. It is for this reason, in part, that urns are 

 out of place there. The same idea would exclude every thing like imi- 

 tation of distinctively pagan forms of architecture, unless they have 

 received the Christian sanction by use. I suppose the use of vaults 

 will always be retained by those who shrink from bowing to the 

 divine decree of dust to dust," but if we are to have vaults, let us 



