To the cold, squalid mansions of the dead!
This highly polished gem, which shone so bright,
Impervious now, eclips’d in viewless night
From earthly eye, irradiates no more
This nether sphere!”—
What follows, though in the same strain of genuine grief and exalted friendship, is but an amplification of these lines; and too diffuse for any eyes but those to which the object of the panegyric had been familiar; and which, from habitually seeing and studying that honoured object, coveted, like Dr. Burney himself, to dwell, to linger upon its excellencies with fond reminiscence.
Mrs. Gast, the sister of Mr. Crisp, and Mrs. Catherine Cooke, his residuary legatee, put up a monument to his memory in the little church of Chesington, for which Dr. Burney wrote the following epitaph.
To the Memory
OF
SAMUEL CRISP, ESQ.,
Who died April 24, 1783, aged 76.
May Heaven—through our merciful Redeemer—receive his soul!
Reader! This rude and humble spot contains