In pursuing my investigations it was soon evident that the period of
the allegorical gravestone was confined sharply and almost exclusively
to the eighteenth century. I have seldom met one earlier than 1700,
and those subsequent to 1800 are very rare. Of gravestones generally
it may almost be said that specimens of seventeenth-century date
are exceedingly few. There are reasons for this, as will afterwards
appear. But the endurance even of the longest-lived of all the old
memorials cannot be very much longer extended, and this may be my
excuse for preserving and perpetuating the features of some of them as
a not uninteresting phase of the vanishing past. I do not claim for
my subject any great importance, but present it as one of the small
contributions which make up history. One other plea I may urge in my
defence. This is a branch of study which, so far as I can ascertain,
has been quite neglected. There are books by the score dealing with
the marble, alabaster, and other tombs within the churches, there
are books of epitaphs and elegies by the hundred, and there are
meditations among the graves sufficient to satisfy the most devout and
exacting of readers, but the simple gravestone of the churchyard as an
object of sculptured interest has I believe found hitherto no student
and is still looking for its historian.




CHAPTER II.

THE EVOLUTION OF GRAVESTONES.