"Who would lay
His body in the City burial-place,
To be cast up again by some rude sexton?"

In my experience the chief sinner is not the city, but the country,
sexton.

Other memorials than the headstone are scarcely included in my
subject. Few of the slate slabs which answer the purpose in Wales
and some of the bordering counties can maintain their inscriptions in
legible condition for a very long period, and they are in all respects
inferior to stone in durability. This thought would have given no
anxiety to the writer of some Chapters on Churchyards which appeared
in "Blackwood's Magazine" about 1820. Said he:

"In parts of Warwickshire and some of the adjacent counties, more
especially in the churchyards of the larger towns, the frightful
fashion of black tombstones is almost universal--black tombstones,
tall and slim, and lettered in gold, looking for all the world
like upright coffin-lids.... Some village burial-grounds here have,
however, escaped this treatment, and within the circuit of a few miles
round Warwick itself are many small hamlet churches each surrounded by
its lowly flock of green graves and grey headstones.... some half sunk
into the churchyard mould, many carved out into cherubins with their
trumpeter's cheeks and expanded wings, or with the awful emblems,
death's heads and bones and hour-glasses."

Of the so-called black tombstones I have seen none other than slate.

In a short tour through Wales, in 1898, I found very few old