BAMPTON CHURCH.
No one ever reads architectural descriptions, and so let it suffice to say that the interior of Bampton church is very well worth seeing; notably for its fine Saxon and Transitional-Norman chancel-arch. The monuments include one with a mutilated stone effigy of George Tompson, dated 1603. It could never have been a good example of the sculptor’s art; and time and unsympathetic hands have conspired to reduce it to something the appearance of an almost shapeless log, but the rhymed epitaph, cast in characteristic early seventeenth-century form, has a certain prettiness of imagination:
“Heavne hath my sovle in happiest ioye and blisse;
Earthe hath my earthe, whear bodie tomed is.
Poore have my store, for ever to their vse;
Frendes have my name, to keepe withovt abvse.
Heaven, earth, poore, frendes, of me have had their parte,
And this in lief was chefest ioye of harte.”
