Could any of your correspondents give any account of the family of either of them?
Y. S. M.
Gravestone Inscription (Vol. viii., p. 268.).—The gravestone inscription communicated by Julia R. Bockett consists of the last four lines of the ballad of "Death and the Lady" (see Dixon's Ballads, by the Percy Society). They should be:
"The grave's the market-place where all men meet,
Both rich and poor, as well as small and great:
If life were merchandise that gold could buy,
The rich would live, the poor alone would die."
In the introduction to Smith's edition of Holbein's Dance of Death, the editor says:
"The concluding lines have been converted into an epitaph, to be found in most of our village churchyards."
Of the truth of which assertion the churchyard of Milton-next-Gravesend, in Kent, furnishes an illustration, as I copied the lines from a stone there some years ago. Being generally, I imagine, quoted from memory, they do not appear to be exactly similar in any two instances.