[The information required by our correspondent is more quaint and curious than difficult to supply. The four lines with which the title concludes form a chronogram, or an inscription comprising a certain date and number, expressed by those letters inserted in larger characters; which are to be taken separately and added together, according to their value as Roman numerals. When the arithmetical letters occurring in the first two lines are thus taken, they will be found to compose the year 1660, when the Lady Farewell died,
as the words declare; and when the numerals are selected from the last two lines, they exhibit 74, her age at the time, as they also indicate; in the following manner:—
| D | 500 | I | 1 |
| LL | 100 | VIXI | 17 |
| II | 2 | I | 1 |
| MI | 1001 | VL | 55 |
| LVI | 56 | — | |
| I | 1 | 74 | |
| —— | — | ||
| 1660 |
The lady who is commemorated in this inscription was the daughter of Sir Edwald Seymour of Berrie Castle, in Devonshire, Baronet, and wife of "the excellently-accomplished Sir George Farewell, Knight, who died May 14, 1647;" as it is recorded on his monument at Hill-Bishops. In the same epitaph it is stated, that she was the mother of twenty children, and that she died Dec. 13, 1660; and the inscription concludes with these verses to the united memory of Sir George and Lady Farewell:
"A person graceful, learn'd, humble, and good,
Well match'd with beautie, virtue, and high blood:
Yet, after sufferings great and long, both dead
To mind us where great worth is honouréd."
Collinson's Somersetshire, vol. iii. p. 255.
The practice of making chronograms for the expressing of dates in books, epitaphs, and especially on medals, was extremely common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the most remarkable is that commemorating the death of Queen Elizabeth:—