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Fig. 14.—Sampler by Elizabeth Stockwell. 1832.
The late Mr A. Tuer.

The gruesomeness of the grave is forcibly brought to notice in a sampler dated 1736:—

“When this you see, remember me,
And keep me in your mind;
And be not like the weathercock
That turn att every wind.
When I am dead, and laid in grave,
And all my bones are rotten,
By this may I remembered be
When I should be forgotten.”

Ann French put the same sentiment more tersely in the lines:—

“This handy work my friends may have
When I am dead and laid in grav.” 1766.

It is a relief to turn to the quainter and more genuine style of Marg’t Burnell’s verse taken from Quarles’s “Emblems,” and dated 1720:—

“Our life is nothing but a winters day,
Some only breake their fast, & so away,
Others stay dinner, & depart full fed,
The deeper age but sups and goes to bed.
Hee’s most in debt, that lingers out the day,
Who dyes betimes, has lesse and lesse to pay.”

This verse has crossed the Atlantic, and figures on American samplers.

But the height of despair was not reached until the early years of the nineteenth century, when “Odes to Passing Bells,” and such like, brought death and the grave into constant view before the young and hardened sinner thus:—