CHAPTER XI.

OLD GRAVESTONES IN SCOTLAND.


A very peculiar interest attaches to the old stones which survive
in the burial-grounds of Scotland. Regarded generally they are of a
description quite apart from the prevalent features of their English
and Irish prototypes. Taking the same period as hitherto in limiting
our purview of the subject, that is from the latter part of the
seventeenth to the early part of the nineteenth century, it may
perhaps be said that the Scottish headstones are tablets of Scottish
history and registers of Scottish character during a long and
memorable time. The one all-prevalent feature everywhere is indicative
of the severe piety and self-sacrifice of an age and a people
remarkable for one of the simplest professions of faith that has
ever existed under the Christian dispensation. The rigid discipline,
contempt for form, and sustained humility of the old Covenanters are
written deeply in the modest stones which mark the green graves of
their faithful dead during a period of fully two hundred years. The
vainglory of a graven stone to exalt the virtues of imperfect men and
women was to them a forbidden thing; the ostentation even of a name
carved on a slab was at variance with doctrine; the cravings of a poor
humanity to be remembered after death had to be satisfied with bare
initials, and initials are all that were written on the gravestones
in many thousands of cases, probably ninety per cent, of the whole,
throughout the eighteenth century and approximate years. But the