not so well known as it used to be-Mr. John Poole's parody on Hamlet's famous speech to Ophelia :

LET me tell you, Miss Ophelia, your behaviour's very rude,

And your

whims and freaks and fancies ought in time to be subdued,

So, if my advice will better you, to give it is my duty; Imprimis-Let your honesty discourse not with your beauty,

Won't you, won't you, won't you to a nunnery go?

I told you once I loved you, but 'twas easy to perceive That I didn't care a fig for you, as now you may believe. In future trust to nobody, we're arrant knaves at best, And I (as soon you'll guess) am no better than the rest. Won't you, &c.

If you marry (just to comfort you) this plague take for your portion,

You'll not escape from calumny, however great your caution;

But if you wed, pray wed a fool, if disengaged your heart is

I need not state my reason-but 'tis better for all parties, Won't you, &c.

I've heard too of your paintings-that you use both red and white;

Heav'n gave you one face, and to make another is not right.

Your pranks have made me mad, so no more weddingbells shall jingle

The married may remain so, but the rest shall all keep single.

Won't you, &c.

EPITAPHS.

EPITAPHS are the paradoxes of literature. Nothing could be more curious than a study of the varied feelings which prompt them—a record of the quaint, revengeful, humorous, regretful moods— of the half-waggish, half-desperate sorrow, and sometimes even the grim joy, that slips into them, and preserves itself there. Charles Lamb asserted that "satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone;" but human nature will have its own way; and there is, probably, no tablet with which the satirist has really been freer; making it serve him to set, as it were, the balance straight with the dead; and again transforming the hard and unfeeling marble into a grim medium on which to deposit his scorn for the weaknesses of the race. It is doubly suggestive and significant when the writer is also the subject. Then we have often

exquisite touches of irony concealing themselves under affected earnest, or broad satire sealed under quaintest self-revelation. To contemplate oneself as if one were not," cannot readily be conceived as likely to give birth to unique playfulness of mood, nor capability to toss grotesque image upon image piling Pelion on Ossa — to magnify one's right to be observed and spoken of. And yet so contradictory is the human heart, that no class of Epitaphs are fuller of interest, and even of amusement, than this one. Hawthorne said of one of his characters that he revealed himself by hiding his face; and so, certainly we may say, it is here. It is readily admitted that to joke over a grave— more particularly to joke over your own grave in prospect seems the most inconsequent and irreverent of proceedings: and yet so strangely is man constituted, that he can, with almost better grace than any-where else, relieve his real feelings by a species of fun. The very best Epitaphs are smile-provoking. It is as if human gravity so long kept on the strain could not survive its own expression, and smiled perforce at catching a sight of its countenance. At all events, no places have been the depositories of more humour and oddity than churchyards. There is not one of any age which

does not possess its group of curiosities. Perhaps self-consciousness and egotism have their own share in the humour of churchyard literature. We all remember how that, when Hugh Miller tried to induce folks to employ him to cut grave-stone inscriptions by offering gratuitously to write Epitaphs for them, as he fancied he could do it better than they could do it for themselves, the very proposal frightened away all possible patrons, and he would soon have been at beggary had he not tried something else. To quote Charles Lamb again may seem supererogatory; but it is so strange to find him quarrelling with wit and oddity that the quaint irony of the situation may suffice to justify the citation: "I conceive disgust," he writes, " at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones;" but though he had earnestly set himself to improve them as Hugh Miller did, it is doubtful if he would have succeeded any better; we may even doubt whether a quaint name or a grim one would not have moved him to humorous utterance after all.

We have gathered many specimens of eccentric Epitaphs-some direct from the tombstones, others from Mr. Fairley's book, and other books, and we shall now set a selection before the reader. We

shall begin with a few on trades and professionsa very common type of Epitaph. This one from Houghton churchyard, on a blacksmith, has undoubtedly some character and clearness :

My sledge and hammer lie declin'd,
My bellows too have lost their wind;
My fire is spent, my forge decayed,
My vice is on the dust all laid;
My coal is spent, my iron gone,
My nails are drove, my work is done;
My fire-dried corpse here lies at rest,
My soul, smokelike, soars to be blest.

This is from Ockham churchyard :—

Though many a sturdy oak he laid along,
Felled by Death's surer hatchet, here lies Spong.
Posts he oft made, yet ne'er a place could get,
And lived by railing, though he had no wit.
Old saws he had, although no antiquarian,
And stiles corrected, yet was no grammarian.

The next is on George Joblin, shoemaker, Wallsend, and was written by himself:

My cutting-board's to pieces split,
My sign-stick measures no more feet,
My lasts are broke all into holes,
My blunt knife will cut no more soles,
My fuddling-caps to thrums are wore,
My apron is to tie no more,

My welt goes out, my awls are broken,
And merry glees are all forgotten.