REVENGE ON THE DEAD.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XII, Issue IX, 3 March 1894, Page 193

REVENGE ON THE DEAD.

VINDICTIVENESS AS SHOWN IN EPITAPHS. Epitaphs are not the most authentic source for biographical data, perhaps, but a study of some of this mortuary literature, if it serves no other purpose, surely exposes some peculiar turns and twists in this human nature of ours. There is something almost pathetic in the helplessness of all mortals against these cost mortem attacks from friends and foes. When a man leaves the world he makes bis exit as Sir Peter does in the well-known scene, saying : * I leave my character behind me,’ and he can be as sure as Sir Peter himself was that his friends only waited for the door to close before they relieved their minds of an estimate of him. * Here lies a man of good repute. He wore a No 16 boot; ’Tie not recorded how he died. But sure it is that opened wide The gates of Heaven must have been. To letsuch monstrous feet within.' -Such is the cruel legend which, an old tombstone holds

up in Massachusetts. Cruel is the exact word, for what is it but the refinement of cruelty to make such feet follow man even after death ; to hold them up to public view, as it were, long after their long-suffering owner is snugly tucked away under ground ’ Here he is dead, poor fellow, but alas for the futility of human wishes the offending feet still make him noteworthy, and will stand on bis tombstone for all time. Though physical deformity excites our svmpathv, moral obliquity should have no pity, and the gentlest nature feels a sort of grim satisfaction in reading the following inscription placed over a crusty Scrocge in an old churchyard : Here lies old thirty-five percent. The more he made, the more he lent; The more he got. the more he craved, The more he made, the more he shaved. Good God ! can such a soul be saved I What a terrible warning to the brethren on ’Change 1 Gentlemen of the law must qnake when in passing through a graveyard in Dorsetshire, England, they read

on the tombstone of one of their fraternity the inscription : Here he lies—as he always did— Stranger be civil. The rest God knows. So does the devil. Usually in the making of epitaphs de mortal's nil nisi bonum is the rate followed, but the above inscriptions and many more show that sometimes the brutal truth is blurted out so forcibly, in fact, that one suspects the living is getting even at last for some ancient sufferings and in a rather cowardly way, hitting a fellow when he is down, so to speak. For instance : Here lies wife the second of o’d Wing Rogers. She’s safe from cares and he from bothers. If death h <d known thee as well as I, He ne'er had stopoed. but passed thee by, I wish him joy. but I much fear He’ll rue the day he came thee near. Now that’s a cowardly epitaph. Old Wing Rogers, it is safe to say, was very likely the most cowed of henpecked husbands, who never dared to * sass back ’ when • wife the second ’ was in the flesh, and now be takes this ungenerous

way to give her impudence when the old lady is constrained to silence by circumstances over which she has no control. According to the date on the stone Wing himself must have died long years ago. How he excused the indiscieet outburst to the lady when he met her in the * Sweet By and Bye ’ it would be curious to know. Death does not soften hearts in Jersey, for in one of its cemeteries is this ill-tempered epitaph : To the memory of Mary Go'd, Who was go'd in nothing but her name. Sho was a tolerable woman for an acquaintance, ButO. H. himself couldn’t live with her. Her temper was furious. Her tongue was vindictive. She resented a look and frowned at a smile And was sour as vinegar. She punished the earth upwards of forty years To say nothing of relations. Poor Mary Gold 1 No wonder she was vindictive and sour if she had relatives so unfeeling as those who composed her epitaph must have been.