(In memory of John Wight, 1633.)
Secondly there is the question of the protecting gravestone. This is also not uncommonly met with. The poet Gray’s well-known “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” contains the following verse:—
“Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.”
But there could be few notions more false. Gravestones have often enough been “moved about to give more appearance of room,” and oftener still cleared away altogether, while the bodies beneath have been cast out almost as soon as they were buried; and unfortunately there are many country churchyards now which are terribly overcrowded. A short time after the death of Lawrence Sterne his admirers collected money to put a monument on his grave in St. George’s burial-ground, Bayswater Road. It was erected in what was supposed to be about the right position—no one could point to the exact spot where the body lay.
Thirdly we have the idea of the hungering grave, which is carried to a ridiculous point in this passage from “The Wonderful Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sicke of the Plague.”—“Let us look forth, and try what consolation rises with the sun. Not any, not any; for, before the jewel of the morning be fully set in silver, hundred hungry graves stand gaping; and every one of them (as at a breakfast) hath swallowed downe ten or eleven lifeless carcases. Before dinner, in the same gulfe, are twice so many more devoured. And, before the Sun takes his rest, those numbers are doubled.”
SHEEP IN THE SAVOY CHURCHYARD ABOUT 1825.