The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead—but to the grave.
Yet e'en these bones, from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by the unletter'd muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply;
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.
This poem—the finest of the kind in the English language—might, with equal fitness, have been written of this peaceful churchyard of Rostherne village. Man, whom Quarles calls a "worm of five feet long," is so liable to have his thoughts absorbed by the art of keeping himself bodily alive, that he is none the worse for a hint from the literature of the churchyard:—
Art is long, and life is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
We walked over the gravestones, reading the inscriptions, some of which had a strain of simple pathos in them, such as the following:—
Ye that are young, prepare to die,
For I was young, and here I lie.
Others there were in this, as in many other burial-places, which were either unmeaning, or altogether unsuitable to the situation they were in. There were several half-sunken headstones in different parts of the yard, mostly bemossed and dim with age. One or two were still upright; the rest leaned one way or other. These very mementoes, which pious care had set up, to keep alive the memories of those who lay mouldering in the earth below, were sinking into the graves of those they commemorated.
At the outside of the north-east entrance of the church, lies an ancient stone coffin, dug up a few years ago in the graveyard. Upon the lid of the coffin was sculptured the full-length figure of a knight, in a complete suit of mail, with sword and shield. No further clue has been obtained to the history of this antique coffin and its effigy, than that it belonged to one of the Cheshire family of Venables, whose crest and motto ("Sic Donec") it bears. The church contains many interesting monuments, belonging to this and other families of the old gentry of Cheshire. Several of these are of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the finest and most interesting monuments in the church, as works of art, are those belonging to the Egerton family, of Tatton Park. At a suitable time, the sexton occasionally takes a visitor up to the gate which separates the Egerton seat and monuments from the rest of the church, and, carefully unlocking it, ascends two steps with a softened footfall, and leads him into the storied sanctum of the Lords of Tatton; where, among other costly monuments, he will be struck by the chaste and expressive beauty of a fine modern one, in memory of a young lady belonging to this family. On a beautiful tomb, of the whitest marble, the figure of a young lady reclines upon a mattress and pillow of the same, in the serenest grace of feature and attitude: and "the rapture of repose" which marks the expression of the countenance, is a touching translation, in pure white statuary, of those beautiful lines in which Byron describes the first hours of death:—