DUNCHURCH.
Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with its back turned upon the church, the white marble effigy of “the Right Honble. Lord John Douglas Montagu Douglas Scott” cuts a ludicrous figure in the centre of the village. The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy, it simply serves to point to what depths the art of sculpture had descended in the early Sixties, when it was wrought. The inscription states that Lord Douglas Scott died in 1860, and that the statue “was erected by his tenantry in affectionate memory of him.” The clothes worn at that period give, of course, their own element of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is represented to be carrying under his arm has occasioned the derisive query, “Who stole the altar-cloth?”
LORD JOHN SCOTT’S STATUE.
Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty place, rejoices in a number of minor curiosities. The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric monument of Thomas Newcombe, King’s Printer in the reigns of Charles II., James II., and William III. It is in the shape of folding-doors of white marble. In the churchyard, too, he who searches in the right place will discover the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 1751, “A Ged year 25.” The advice given is better than the jingle to which it is set:—
To all young men
That me survive
Who dyed at less
Than twenty-five,
I do this Good