"Epitaph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... while life remained. She built and supported at her own expense an extensive monastery for Jerome and his monks at Bethlehem. When she died, Jerome wrote to her daughter the long and celebrated letter called "Epitaph of Paula," in which he exhausts the hyperboles of praise. The features of a rare character and the proofs of an extraordinary affection may be discerned within the extravagances of this eloquent ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Johnson's death there appeared in the newspapers and magazines an illiberal and petulant attack upon him, in the form of an Epitaph, under the name of Mr. Soame Jenyns, very unworthy of that gentleman, who had quietly submitted to the critical lash while Johnson lived. It assumed, as characteristicks of him, all the vulgar circumstances of abuse which had circulated amongst the ignorant. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... upon some lines, which combine my old acrostic talent (which you first found out) with my new profession of epitaph-monger. As you did not please to say, when you would die, I have left a blank space for the date. May kind heaven be a long time in filling it up. At least you cannot say that these lines are not about you, though not much to the purpose. We were very sorry to hear that you have not been ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... privilege rarity stupidity verify epitaph retinue nutriment vestige medicine impediment prodigy serenity terrify edifice orifice ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... doing his duty like the officer and gentleman he was." Could any man have a finer epitaph? It is an extract from a letter written by Private J. Fairclough, Yorkshire Light Infantry, to General A. Wynn, and refers to the death of the General's son, Lieutenant G.O. Wynn, killed in action at Landrecies. The letter goes ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... long discussions on art with Monsieur Fabre. The woman whose presence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a matter of indifference to him. But, nevertheless, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never wrote more completely from his heart than when, composing the epitaph of the Countess, he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been loved by him more than anything on earth, and held almost as a mortal divinity. "A Victorio Alferio ... ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... As Boadicea felt towards the Roman, so feels many a Boer matron to-day against the Briton, and when Britons shall have followed Romans into the history of the past, the Afrikander race shall write an epitaph upon their cenotaph. Ambition! By that sin fell the angels, and by that sin fall the Angles. But oh, the pity of it! For of all the nations that in turn have risen and waxed great upon the surface of the globe, there are none for whose ideals the Boers feel more sympathy ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... Theocritus's Lament for Daphnis (Idyl i) in which Thyrsis is the mourning shepherd. Hylas was taken away by nymphs who admired his beauty and Bion is the subject of Moschus's Epitaph of ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... colleague of Davis, was a "Webster Whig" and a powerful exponent of the "Free-Soil" faith. Davis, who was so bright and clever in the drawing-room, could not, however, compete with Rantoul on the floor of the House in parliamentary debate. The epitaph on Rantoul's monument says that "He died at his post in Congress, and his last words were a protest in the name of Democracy against the Fugitive-Slave Law." One of the verses of Whittier's poem, entitled "Rantoul," ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... admitted to the company of the Governor, and the parties of the military, who yet, it is said, were not pleased with the abrupt suppression of the absolute ban. He died within the year of his elevation to the bench. Governor Macquarie commanded an epitaph to be placed on his tomb, stating that "it was in consequence of his character and conduct, that he appointed him to the magistracy; and that, by the same act, he restored him to the rank in society he had lost." His death was regretted by his neighbours, who in a public address ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... by slander" cried he, with a laugh, "Thus should the poets frame my epitaph, Above whose mouldering dust it will be said, 'Blessed be Allah that the hound is dead!'" Out rang a rhythmic revel as he spake From joyous bulbuls in the poplar brake, Hailing the night's first blossom in the sky. And now, with failing foot, he drew ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... of France, where his career Of conquest ended, let his relics lie! So far no hostile sword attained before. A fitting tomb shall memorize his name; His epitaph the spot whereon ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Chopin's room when I was getting a lesson. Meyerbeer was not announced, he was king. I was playing the Mazurka in C (Op. 33), printed on one page which contains so many hundreds—I called it the epitaph of the idea [Grabschrift des Begriffs], so full of distress and sadness is the composition, the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... editorial I quoted the epitaph once engraved on a tombstone: "He done his damnedest. Angels ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... faculty. The charming piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been republished in the Tales from Blackwood; and the mono-rhymed epitaph on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature, but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these things are mere ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the date and the motive of the assassination, gave the name of the assassin. This note he had shut up in that box where, doubtless, the stolen money was, and, in a last effort, his bloody finger had traced like an epitaph the initials of his name. Before those two red letters, Dingo must have remained for many days! He had learned to know them! He could no longer forget them! Then, returned to the coast, the dog had been picked up by the captain of the "Waldeck," and finally, on board ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... of the flock, Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me. You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio, Than to live still, and write my epitaph. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return to journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now, in that he had not as yet cleared off the debt he had unavoidably ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... heard of a man reading his own epitaph, and truly it gave me many curious feelings to stand there and read of myself as a dead man. And yet I had been dead to all of them for more ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... family, one Guido Antonio, became locally famous as an expounder of the law and a diplomat. Respecting him an epitaph was composed, the last two lines of which might, if applied to Amerigo, ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... old-time dinner, at least, that Antonio provided; but, alas! those others were not there to eke out the illusion of the past. To each name, as I uttered it, Antonio added an epitaph. This one had gone to bury himself in the Abruzzi hills. That one had become a professor at Bologna. Others, in vanishing, had left no ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... life by violence, or whether mere distaste of life and the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was not clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency of his end; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind: and some there were who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep for ever upon his grave, as in contempt of the transient and shallow ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... transitory uneasiness. A man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie, will not hazard his character with posterity, by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to his country, and on an occasion like this. Yes, my lords, a man who does not wish to have his epitaph written until his country is liberated, will not leave a weapon in the power of envy, or a pretence to impeach the probity which he means to preserve, even in the grave, to which ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of Blenheim, a ponderous and lasting monument of our unfortunate Battle of Hochstet. Were the apartments but as spacious as the walls are thick, this castle would be commodious enough. Some wag, in an epitaph he made on Sir John Vanbrugh, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... surly boatman of the Styx. Lingeringly is the last look taken of the familiar countenance, as the procession passes slowly around the tomb; and the moaning is made,—a sound of groans going up to the seventh heavens,—and the earth is thrown in, and the headstone with epitaph placed duly to hallow the grave of the dead. Or if, according to the custom of his native land, the body of Euclid is committed to the funeral flames, the pyre, duly prepared with combustibles, is made the centre of the ring; a ponderous jar of turpentine or whiskey ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... "sleeping beneath the sod." What a place for meditation! How quiet, how solemn! No one should visit New York without allotting at least half a day to these holy grounds. How I wander from grave to grave! Here I am struck with the text of an impressive epitaph, and there I see the delicate and elaborate workmanship of a skillful master. Here my heart is touched by the sweet simplicity of a simple slab bearing some touching lines, there I stand in silent admiration before the magnificent proportions ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... honorable to the poet as to the painter. Had all dedications been occasioned by such feelings as gave birth to this, these graceful and fitting tributes of affection and gratitude would never have dwindled away to the cold and scanty lines, like an epitaph on a charity tomb-stone, in which they appear, when they appear at all, in most ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... various songs of Herrick, a lyrist whose verse is not usually congenial to the modern music-maker. Loomis' "Epitaph on a Virgin" must be classed as a success. Indeed, it reaches positive grandeur at its climax, wherein is woven the grim persistence of a tolling bell. In the same style is a clever setting of Ben Jonson's much ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... stunned him; the young ill-spent life was over. Did he call upon his God for succor as he went down into his watery grave? Who knows what cry went up to heaven? The old epitaph that was engraved on the tomb of a notorious ill-liver speaks quaintly ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... personal influence over each one individually. With a small class he could get to know each by name, and win the affections of all one by one. The words, "He loved little children," which were the only epitaph on the tomb of a certain Sunday-school teacher, might well be applied to Gordon. It is difficult to say what kind of teacher he was, or whether he availed himself of the latest developments in the art of instructing children; but this is quite ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... will show us the place where three of his favorite horses are buried, for he does not sell the old horses who have done him good service, but has them buried "with the honors of war"—that is, standing upright, with their halters and shoes on. Above one of them he has placed the epitaph: ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... been getting newspapers myself, though, sent by my friend Rosa; and as long as the mis-reporters concerned themselves with my own doings and failures to do, and lied as tenderly as an epitaph about my disappearance from London, I cut them up and burned them. But when they forgot me, and began to treat of other people's triumphs, I made Neilus my waste-paper basket, on the understanding that the papers were to go to the fishermen just home from Kinsale. Then from time to time ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... man, wrote a treatise on obesity and used his own portrait for a frontispiece. He speaks of Doctor Beddoes, who was so uncomfortably fat that a lady of Clifton called him a "walking feather bed." He mentions Doctor Stafford, who was so enormous that this epitaph was ascribed to him:— ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... The Soldier's Consolation Genial Impulse Neither this nor that The way to behave The best As broad as it's long The Rule of Life The same, expanded Calm at Sea The Prosperous Voyage Courage My only Property Admonition Old Age Epitaph Rules for Monarchs Paulo ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... had an ancient and holy smell. It was very cool in there out of the sun. I turned into the nave, and wandered about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back to ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... contents of this and the foregoing paragraphs may be grouped here. The Rev. H. Pickering was rector of Aldwinkle (the better form) All-Saints from 1507 to 1637, not from 1647 to 1657. This destroys Scott's inference. The error arose from a misreading of his epitaph. "The village" did not strictly belong to Lord Exeter: but he had property in Aldwinkle St. Peter's, and the two parishes are close together, one church being at one end and the other at the other of the joint ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... be lamented that this curious epitaph is mutilated. It is said that the sacrilegious British soldiers made a target of this stone during the war of Independence. How odious an animosity which pauses not at the grave! How brutal that which spares ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... this period that Michael Chamillard, the Minister of War, introduced billiards into France by the way of Versailles. He played with Louis XIV and pleased him greatly, but Chamillard was no statesman, as history and the following lines from his epitaph point out. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... a perfect thing, and so are the "Lines on the Spring." page 28. The "Epitaph on an Infant," like a Jack-o'-lantern, has danced about (or like Dr. Forster's [4] scholars) out of the "Morning Chronicle" into the "Watchman," and thence back into your collection. It is very pretty, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the other. It is like the question of the precise degree of injury done by alcoholic drinks. To-day's newspaper writes the eulogy of A.B., who recently died at the age of ninety-nine, without ever tasting ardent spirits; to-morrow's will add the epitaph of C.D., aged one hundred, who has imbibed a quart of rum a day since reaching the age of indiscretion; and yet, after all, both editors have to admit that the drinking usages of society are growing decidedly more decent. It is the same with the tobacco argument. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Stanton, that it was not only a broken heart, but a broken fiddle you left behind you, when you departed so suddenly last time you were here? It's astonishing how soon hearts get mended, and fiddles too, it appears. Goody has shuddered at the sight of that instrument ever since. I thought the epitaph on her tombstone would ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... short, is an improvement on Oxford in the long vacation—the place, however, has its ancient fame, has given birth to two or three distinguished literati, and figured in the civil wars. The fifteenth century records among others the name of Cini, whose epitaph we saw in the cathedral; and the author of the Riciardetto was, we believe, also one of its citizens. In its immediate vicinity fell Catiline. They say the Italian language is spoken here with great purity of accent, which is remarkable, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Trivulzio, who cried, "Sir, ah! sir, just one moment's audience!" Trivulzio, on reaching home, took to his bed, and died there a month afterwards, on the 5th of December, 1518, having himself dictated this epitaph, which was inscribed on his tomb, at Milan, "J. J. Trivulzio, son of Anthony: he who never rested, rests. Hush!" [J. J. Trivultius, Antonii filius, qui ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... coronation. His corpse was interred the same evening in the church of the monastery, according to his will; and his tomb was covered with a plain stone, on which, ten years after, Manso, his friend and admirer, caused this simple epitaph ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... in charge of ministers sent over from Sweden. The baptismal font is the original one brought from Sweden, and the communion service has been in use since 1773. In the adjoining churchyard the oldest tombstone bearing a legible epitaph is dated 1708. Here Alexander Wilson, the celebrated naturalist, was buried at his own request, saying that the "birds would be apt to come ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... the original and. Gent. Mag. x. 464. The title of this poem as there given is:—'An epitaph upon the celebrated Claudy Philips, Musician, who died ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... selected as the first manager of his works Captain Bill Jones; his amazing judgment was justified when Jones developed into America's greatest practical genius in making steel. "Here lies the man"—Carnegie once suggested this line for his epitaph—"who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself." Carnegie inspired these men with his own energy and restlessness; the spirit of the whole establishment automatically became that of the pushing ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... who gave our board such gust,— Life's care, may he o'erstep it half, And when Death hooks him, as he must, He'll do it featly, as I trust, And J. H. write his epitaph! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over to ask that there might be despatched to them some hierarchical assistance for the good of their souls, and were answered: "D——n your souls, grow tobacco!" The English manner of to-day could not even have come into its own when that epitaph of a lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert Murray, was written: "Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of Heaven." About that gravestone ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows, with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at sea. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... afterwards carried to Delft, and deposited in the tomb of his ancestors. He wrote this modest epitaph for himself, ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... while drinking at a Bar a hanger on who was notorious for his much drinking and was dubbed the Marquis, asked Burns to write an appropriate epitaph ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... taught the world wisdom.' Laputa was speaking English in a strange, thin, abstracted voice. 'There would have been no king like me since Charlemagne,' and he strayed into Latin which I have been told since was an adaptation of the Epitaph of Charles the Great. 'Sub hoc conditorio,' he crooned, 'situm est corpus Joannis, magni et orthodoxi Imperatoris, qui imperium Africanum nobiliter ampliavit, et multos per annos mundum feliciter rexit.'[1] He must have chosen this ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... interesting antiquities in iron, so that only a limited number of specimens of this metal have come down to us from very early times; one of the earliest in England is a grave-stone of cast metal, of the date 1350: it is decorated with a cross, and has the epitaph, "Pray for the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... was engraved by some cause or other never reached Canada. However, in 1831, Lord Aylmer erected over the tomb of the marquis, in the Ursuline Convent, a simple mural tablet of white marble, having the following concise and beautiful epitaph from his ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... signs it had, was likely to live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death aroused much public interest, or the Ode on the Nativity, plainly challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... worse: Read and pronounce! The meed of praise is thine; But still let his be his and mine be mine. I say no more; but how can you for- swear Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well; [106] So, too, the epitaph which still you read? Think you they faced my sepulchre with lies — Gross lies, so evident and palpable That every townsman must have wot of it, And not a worshipper within the church But must have smiled to see the marbled fraud? Surely this ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... living spouse, as if he were inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones in a lot. I was better pleased with a rough old whaling captain, who gave directions for a broad marble slab, divided into two compartments, one of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife, and the other to be left vacant, till death should engrave his own name there. As is frequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much of this storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the French ambassador, and his papers were searched.[291] In this case there were none that compromised Stuart, and his career was not cut short in the ignominious manner that befell Drake, over whom there may be inscribed as epitaph the warning which Talleyrand gave to young aspirants—"et surtout ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... and which it so nearly resembles in rhythm. But the best of it is equal as poetry, and perhaps superior as meaning. And it admirably completes in verse the tribute long before paid by Old Mortality in prose, to the 'last and best of Scots,' as Dryden called him in the noble epitaph,[46] which not improbably inspired Scott himself to do what he could to remove the vulgar aspersions on the fame of the hero ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... almost with splendour. The body, having been conveyed, in compliance with Sir Robert's last directions, to Dublin, was there laid within the ancient walls of St. Audoen's Church—where I have read the epitaph, telling the age and titles of the departed dust. Neither painted escutcheon, nor marble slab, have served to rescue from oblivion the story of the dead, whose very name will ere ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... returns Marston, "if there be a wish (you may go before me, though) I have on earth, it is that when I die our graves may be side by side, with an epitaph to denote master, friend, and faithful servant lie here." He takes the old man by the hand again, as the tears drop from his cheeks. "A prison is but a grave to the man of honourable feelings," he concludes. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... concluded Hippy, "and the habit became so firmly fixed with him that he even rose and chased them in his sleep. He lost flesh at an alarming rate, and three months after his wedding day they laid him to rest in the quiet churchyard, with the touching epitaph over him, 'Things are not ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... Italy are worthy to stand beside the splendid if impoverished House forced by pride to place its unwedded (because undowered) daughter in the convent that needs no dot. Obscure in financial realms alone, it required little search to put my finger on the epitaph of that brother of the cruel letter (a Cardinal before his death), on the father's pictured cruel face—he scorned to eat with the mushroom Romanoffs!—on the carved door-posts where Emperors had entered in the great Italian days, even on the gorgeous sculptured mantel-piece sold by Margarita's ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis that was saying a ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Lord Erskine are said to have been the vainest men of their time. At a dinner some years since, Dr. Parr, in ecstasies with the conversational powers of Lord Erskine, called out to him, though his junior, "My Lord, I mean to write your epitaph." "Dr. Parr," replied the noble lawyer, "it is a temptation ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... that this wonderful mountain became the habitation of a religious community, may be pretty nearly ascertained by the following singular epitaph, on a beautiful monument, still legible in the great church ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... the second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon; though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an epitaph as this, which I ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... tribute from a nameless wanton served for epitaph to the man lying in an unmarked grave in the soldiers plot at Fort Regent. With gnashing of teeth did Garcin and Jack Blunt discover that H. R. M.'s Consul had officially aided Justine Delande to remove the valuable ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... in anticipation my own sympathetic historian, to joy with my joys yet to come, and sorrow with my sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at last to close my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my own epitaph. The pleasure remained with me until I reached the end. How admirably I strutted in front of myself! And I and the better self of me that was flourishing about in the book—we pretended not to know each other for what we were. He was myself with a wig and a sham visiting card, and I ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... it came about that the Gazette had a long column, with headlines like an epitaph, when the sheets of the Intelligence and the Courier were as blank as the faces of their editors. And so, too, it happened that when two weary men, upon two foundered horses, arrived about four in the morning at the Sarras post-office, they looked at each ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... telling of the adventures of those who spend their lives on the great waters. Both, finally, died at the height of power, literally with pen in hand, for both left recent and unfinished work. And the epitaph of either might well be the noble words of Stevenson from his brave essay on the greatness of the stout ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was, during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... most splendid monument to her departed lord over the family vault of the Bluebeards. The rector, Dr. Sly, who had been Mr. Bluebeard's tutor at college, wrote an epitaph in the most pompous yet pathetic Latin: "Siste, viator! moerens conjux, heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse"; in a word, everything that is usually said in epitaphs. A bust of the departed saint, with Virtue mourning over it, stood over the epitaph, surrounded ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... in the strength and number of his kindred. In peace, the earls of Devon resided in their numerous castles and manors of the west; their ample revenue was appropriated to devotion and hospitality; and the epitaph of Edward, surnamed from his misfortune, the blind, from his virtues, the good, earl, inculcates with much ingenuity a moral sentence, which may, however, be abused by thoughtless generosity. After a grateful commemoration ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... epitaph could be composed in memory of Wilson and his comrades. In truth the fame of this death of theirs has spread far and wide throughout the native races of Southern Africa, and Englishmen everywhere reap the benefit of its glory. They also who lie ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... lines of Southey condense, in a small compass, the most remarkable traits of Pizarro. The poet's epitaph may certainly be acquitted of the imputation, generally well deserved, of flattery towards ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... my lord, will you see the Editors well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time. After your death you had better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... fundamentals. It is Howe's merit that he saw this, while Johnston and Falkland did not. After all, their loud cries for a non-party administration only meant an administration in which their own party was supreme. Howe was wholly in the right when he said that Johnston's epitaph should be, 'Here lies the man who denounced party government, that he might form one; and professing justice to all parties, gave ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... known triumph and discouragement beyond the ordinary measure of humanity, turned in the last dark years of imprisonment to a steady contemplation of human activity, and, largely conceiving here, as in all else, planned a "History of the World." Let his own noble words be his epitaph: ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses, regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written by way of epitaph:— ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... knife in his hand, a frown on his face, and his doubts resolved. He no longer shrank from naming what he knew. This was not the first corpse that had been thrown down a well; here, without stone or epitaph, was the grave of Squire Vane. In a flash all the mythological follies about saints and peacocks were forgotten; he was knocked on the head, as with a stone club, by the human common ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... owed to our predecessors in African travel and discovery. The Consul promises now to have the grave repaired and white-washed, and I, on my part, promise, in the event of my return to the interior, to carry with me a small tombstone, to place over the grave, with name, date, and epitaph. If there were a thorough and bonâ fide Geographical Society in England, this little attention to the memory of that distinguished man of science would have been performed long ago. But our societies are ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... you shall cease Teetotal drinks to quaff, And end life's not repairing lease, Might be your epitaph. No carved cross-pipes, no pint-pot's wreath, Shall show you past to Heaven; But water-pipes, and, underneath, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... saw this epitaph, Angus's hair really stood on end with fright, and on the day he found that the boat was gone, leaving no trace, he became absolutely terror-stricken. He sought for it behind every rock and in every likely nook about the lake, consuming days in the quest, and was appalled on his next trip ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... seat of the Earl of Oxford, on the 18th of September, 1721, and was buried in Westminster; where on a monument, for which, as the "last piece of human vanity," he left five hundred pounds, is engraven this epitaph:- ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... were many other Dickenses, 'an industrious Dickens, a public spirited Dickens, but the last one (that is Edwin Drood) was the great one. The wild epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea, "Canst thou do likewise?" should be the serious ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... not to these; or at least not to these in any chief measure. Nay, says the journal, 'more than any agency, it is the cheapness and abundance of our coal which have made us what we are.' If it be so, then 'ashes to ashes' be our epitaph! and the sooner the better. I tell you, gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the pure breath of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body, instead of rotting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with carbonic acid (and great ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... [An epitaph in the form of a ballad that Francois Villon wrote of himself and his company, they expecting shortly ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... His epitaph claims for him the honor of commanding at Concord Bridge, but the weight of evidence is in favor of Major Buttrick as the active commander. And Robinson's fame can well spare even so distinguished an honor as the command at the North ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... courage is extinguished, and all noble aspirations checked, until in middle age we find only the dried-up, cauterized, wizened soul, taught by dread experience to be reticent and cautious, and to allow splendid opportunities to pass unutilized rather than risk the chances of one defeat. And the epitaph on these dead souls ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... character, and were inscribed with epitaphs in which the living vainly tried to immortalise the deeds of the deceased. Every one has heard of the celebrated tomb of Nicholas Flamel and Pernelle his wife (Fig. 63), the cross of Bureau, the epitaph of Yolande Bailly, who died in 1514, at the age of eighty-eight, and who "saw, or might have seen, two hundred and ninety-five children descended ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... Preston, whilom drawer at the tavern. It is now nearly a century since this trusty drawer of good liquor closed his bustling career and was thus quietly deposited within call of his customers. As I was clearing away the weeds from his epitaph the little sexton drew me on one side with a mysterious air, and informed me in a low voice that once upon a time, on a dark wintry night, when the wind was unruly, howling, and whistling, banging about doors ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Copp's Hill burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You love to lean on the free-stone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,—to read the epitaph of stout John Clark, "despiser of little men and sorry actions,"—to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcom and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... with my mother; you can tell how long it was, for it was in 1826; my brother was born in that year; I was quite small then; don't know how she came there; she was with my mother during her confinement; my brother is dead; it is written down in our Testament; and I took an epitaph from it to put on the tombstone; the last time I saw it was when the fellow killed the school-mistress. I looked because about 1830, a man killed a woman, and was hung, and I wanted to see how long ago it was. I have seen her more or less ever since, until within two years. I don't remember ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Prierius, also a minister in Dresden, were imprisoned. As a bloody finale of the Crypto-Calvinistic drama enacted in Electoral Saxony, Chancellor Crell was beheaded, October 9, 1601, after an imprisonment of ten years. Crell was punished, according to his epitaph, as "an enemy of peace and a disturber of the public quiet—hostis pacis et quietis publicae turbator," or, as Hutter remarks in his Concordia Concors, "not on account of his religion, but on account ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... was amazingly better the first day than I am now; I progress from worse to worse. Ah! Bunting, if Peter Dealtry were here, he might help me to an appropriate epitaph: as it is, I suppose I shall be very simply labelled. Fillgrave will do the whole business, and put it down in his bill—item, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... conquered,—and their spirits turned to clay: Lo! how they wander round the world, their grave, Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed, Gibbering at living men, and idly rave, 'We only truly live, but ye are dead.' Alas! poor fools, the anointed eye may trace A dead soul's epitaph in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his back, as it were, to the "flamantia moenia mundi" and hits out, insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes. His secretive and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa—his savage championship of the Irish ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... Washington!" He needs no long and fulsome epitaph carved in marble to tell his worth. Did his memory depend upon that alone, the marble would crumble into dust, mingle with his, and his name pass away with the stone that man vainly thought would preserve it. No; his monument ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... long the ancient and established custom of keeping fools has been disused in England. Swift writes an epitaph on ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... autograph of Francis Lord Norreys on the fly-leaf, and was no doubt a presentation copy to him from Basse. The poetry of this work does not rise above mediocrity, and is not equal in thought or vigour to the Epitaph on Shakspeare. The chief portion of the volume is occupied with the singular tale of "The Youth in the Boat," which is divided into two parts; the first, containing (with the introduction) 59 verses of four lines each, and the second 163, exclusive ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... buried obscurely in the small and ancient church of Gagny; and there, in the southern aisle, near the chapel of the Virgin, some faithful but unknown hand has placed upon a slab of black marble the following epitaph:— ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... hear an extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer? And, to humour the ignorant, I have call'd the deer the Princess killed, ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... usual English manner may be illustrated by quoting a famous epigram—Ben Jonson's epitaph on a boy actor: ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment and distaste of ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... potter's field. The great leveller had passed his rule over him as he passes it over every one of us. The dead lion was less now than the living dog, and the Golden Dog itself was henceforth only a memory, and an epitaph forever of the tragedy of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... My hopes, e'en my hopes, wither; a dark cloud Has passed between them and the glorious sun, Clothing the breathing being in a shroud— The pall is o'er them and their race is run: Their epitaph is written in my heart— The all of mem'ry that can ne'er depart— Yes, it is here! the truth of every dream, The ever-present ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... Union, and his love for it had but increased in exile. He stood by Mr. Clay against the Southern Democrats in the angry contest of 1850, declaring that "if the Union must be dismembered" he "prayed God that its ruins might be the monument of his own grave." He "desired no epitaph to tell that he survived it." Against the madness of repealing the Missouri Compromise he entered a protest and a warning. He notified his Southern friends that the dissolution of the Union might be involved in the dangerous ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... owner of the property, Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, caused all the bones to be collected and buried at the foot of the mound. Some years afterward she marked the mound with the granite slab and its inscribed epitaph. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... English and Dutch ships, the objective being trade along the coast of Malabar and an attempt to open commerce with the Chinese. But Sir Thomas Dale was opening commerce with a vaster, hidden land, for at Masulipatam he died. "Whose valor," says his epitaph, "having shined in the Westerne, was set in ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... noticed that the well-known epitaph, sometimes assigned to Robin of Doncaster, sometimes to Edward Courtenay, third Earl of Devon, and I believe to others besides: "What I gave, that I have," &c., has been anticipated by, if not imitated from, Martial, book v. epigr. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... four short words his epitaph, Sublimely simple, nobly plain; Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... by his wife and family. Wild legends grew about his death, but have no foundation. A peasant clod in San Casciano could not have made a simpler end. He was buried in the family Chapel in Santa Croce, and a monument was there at last erected with the epitaph by Doctor Ferroni—'Tanto nomini nullum par elogium.' The first edition of his complete works was published in 1782, and was ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Dunwood House for the purpose of seeing Rickie, when Rickie had not come to supper yesterday to see him. He was at Sawston to assure himself of his friend's grave. With quiet eyes he had intended to view the sods, with unfaltering fingers to inscribe the epitaph. Love remained. But in high matters he was practical. He knew that it would be useless to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... be found in his epitaph in Redcliffe Church; and the account of Redcliffe steeple—(which had been destroyed by fire before Chatterton's time) came from the bottom of an old ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... stock is gone when the ninety days are up. The most I can hope is to beat him on this suit. That will make my Tecolote stock more valuable and maybe I can borrow the money to pay off the debt at the bank. But I'm busted, right now; I can see my finish. It's just a question of the epitaph the boys will put over my grave, and I want that to be: 'He did his damnedest!' Then I'll get out of town with whatever I have left and begin all over ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... as epitaph meet, O willow, willow, willow! 'Here lies one drank poison for potion most sweet,' O willow, willow, willow! O willow, willow, willow! Sing, O the green willow ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... have devoted his time to the management of the estates and to upholding the territorial privileges of the house. If the epitaph formerly to be seen on a brass on his tomb is to be believed, he was a man prudent, just, pious, esteemed by all, chaste, kind, and adorned with ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... and at the suggestion of my friend, the Editor of this Series, that I undertook to attempt to help posterity in the difficult business of knowing what to add to Hume's epitaph; and I might, with justice, throw upon him the responsibility of my apparent presumption in occupying a place among the men of letters, who are engaged with him, in their proper function of writing about English Men ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... taken to Springfield, Illinois, where they rest at the foot of a small hill in Oakwood Cemetery. A simple monument, with the name—"Lincoln"—upon it, is the only epitaph of him, who next to Washington was the greatest man of our ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... Samson Carrasco, wrote am epitaph for his tomb; and there is written on a tombstone in a little village of La Mancha the praise that those who knew and loved the valiant and doughty, yet gentle Don Quixote of La Mancha felt in their hearts for him, whose last wish was that he might ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... by some, harshly, perhaps, by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... not also an abbe? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hele, who about 1585 gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Tres-Haut, ministre du Christ, il sut garder la chastete et se preserver du contact de l'amour ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Horse's Jumping over. The Friend on the Shore cry'd out, Who's that is drowned trow? He was immediately answer'd, Your Friend, Harry Thompson. He very gravely reply'd, Ay, he had a mad Horse. This short Epitaph from such a Familiar, without more Words, gave me, at that Time under Twenty, a very moderate Opinion of the Friendship of Companions. Thus is Affection and every other Motive of Life in the Generality rooted out ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and her mournful memories. She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her melts away in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... so clear that he recognized the Earl's paramount title as Queen's favourite. To disarm suspicion on that score he adds a postscript: 'The Queen is in very good terms with you, and, thank be to God, well pacified; and you are again her Sweet Robyn.' He cannot have esteemed Leicester. A stinging epitaph, attributed to him with the usual scarcity of evidence, may express his real view of the poor-spirited soldier, the deceitful courtier, the statesman and noble 'that all the world did hate.' But he was no backbiter. Elizabeth vouched for his claim ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... thousand of the splendid throng that filled the church had heard the name of Antonio Del Duca, who lies buried before the high altar without a line to tell of all he did. So lies Bernini, somewhere in Santa Maria Maggiore, so lies Platina,—he, at least, the better for no epitaph,—and Beatrice Cenci and many others, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... exclaimed the sexton, "would you have me haunted py his chost for taking his plessed pones out of consecrated cround? Would you have him come in the tead of the night, and fly away with the roof of my house? Would you have all the crop of my carden come to nothing? for, look you, his epitaph says, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... another states that the body below "is deposited here until the last trump"; and one, which must be the veritable original of the "affliction sore" rhyme, ends: "till death did seize and God did please to ease me of my pain." Still another bears this epitaph, verbatim et literatim— ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... WILMOT, EARL OF, a witty profligate of the court of Charles II.; wrote poems, many of them licentious, among them, however, some exquisite songs; killed himself with his debauchery; died penitent; he was the author of the epitaph, accounted the best epigram in the English language, "Here lies our sovereign Lord the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... us all! Who else like you Could sift the seed corn from our chaff, And make us, with the pen we knew, Deathless at least in epitaph?" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... landed estates, distributed with such reckless profusion amongst the characters, intended as a covert satire upon the vulgar English worship of wealth, or did they imply a genuine instinct for the sumptuous? Disraeli would apparently parody the old epitaph, and write upon the monument of every ducal millionaire, 'Of such are the kingdom of heaven.' Vast landed estates and the Christian virtues, according to him, naturally go together; and he never dismisses a hero without giving ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the end of the Kappa, and my gallant friend, Commander Stephan. His best epitaph was in a corner of the same paper, and was headed "Mark Lane." ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that they would not use one unnecessary word, nor let an expression escape them that had not some sense worth attending to. For one being asked to go and hear a person who imitated the nightingale to perfection, answered, "I have heard the nightingale herself." Another said, upon reading this epitaph, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... several successful stories for young ladies. Her "Biography for Girls" contains various novelettes, in each of which the heroine lives the conventional life and dies the conventional death of the period, and receives a laudatory epitaph. They are remarkable only as being devoid of any interest. Her "Biography for Boys" does not appear to have attained the same popularity as that for girls. A third book, "The Juvenile Biographers," containing the "Lives of Little Masters and Misses," is representative of the changes made ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... "The King's Head," has a dark avenue of yews leading from the road to the porch. A brass to the memory of Archbishop Harsnett may be seen on the floor of the chancel. The epitaph in Latin was ordered to be so written in the will of the archbishop. Translated, the first portion may be read: "Here lieth Samuel Harsnett, formerly vicar of this church. First the unworthy Bishop of Chichester, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... then the "Epigoni" in seven thousand verses beginning: 'And now, Muses, let us begin to sing of men of later days'; for some say that these poems also are by Homer. Now Xanthus and Gorgus, son of Midas the king, heard his epics and invited him to compose a epitaph for the tomb of their father on which was a bronze figure of a maiden bewailing the death of Midas. He ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Scripture may be written as his epitaph: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth; Yea, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors and their ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... the paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the memory ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... purpose they met at a General Synod at Zerawic, and prepared a comprehensive descriptive work, entitled "Ratio Disciplin"—i.e., Account of Discipline.51 It was a thorough, exhaustive, orderly code of rules and regulations. It was meant as a guide and a manifesto. It proved to be an epitaph. In the second place, the Brethren now issued (1615) a new edition of their Catechism, with the questions and answers in four parallel columns—Greek, Bohemian, German and Latin;52 and thus, once more, they shewed their desire to play ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... introduces his reader to a group of characters amongst the most odd and original in fiction. Mr. Shandy, with his syllogisms and his hypotheses, his "close reasoning upon the smallest matters"; Yorick, the witty parson, whose epitaph, Alas! Poor Yorick! expresses so tenderly the amiable faults for which he suffered; Captain Shandy, that combination of simplicity, gentleness, humanity, and modesty, are all creations which deserve to rank with the most individual and happily conceived ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Commons, and Dramatists, including in the latter both writers and actors; the Poet thus having far more reason than now exists for making Hamlet say to the old statesman, "After your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... sighed as she thought of the gifted but unhappy woman who slept near her, and, rising, walked on to Lilly's tomb. Ten years had rolled their waves over her since that little form was placed here. She looked down at the simple epitaph: "He taketh his young lambs home." The cherub face seemed to beam upon her once more, and the sweet, birdlike tones of her childish voice still lingered in the secret cells of memory. She extended her arms, as if to clasp the form borne up by ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... door which shuts off the choir on the right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph, which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... proctor-hating philanthropist on the wall of the south transept of the Cathedral over the brass to Charles Dickens, surmounted by a very curious painted marble half-figure effigy with flowing beard, of "worthy Master Richard starting out of it, like a ship's figurehead." Underneath is the following epitaph:— ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... And wondrous art was built out of the clay, Which, rising round, the carcass did enfold; With words engraven in the marble gray, The warrior's name, his worth and praise that told, On which I gazing stood, and often read That epitaph ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. "By request of that worthy Nobleman's survivors," says he, "I undertook to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yet fully visible to myself, still remains unengraven;"—wherein, we may predict, there is more than the Latinity that ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... estimate that was formed of the virtue of the water, and to the blamable practice which prevailed of sending patients here at their last gasp as a forlorn hope. Of too many it might be said as in these lines from the epitaph on his wife by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... all the facts had been before them. Mr Pontifex had during his own lifetime set up a monument in Elmhurst Church to the memory of his wife (a slab with urns and cherubs like illegitimate children of King George the Fourth, and all the rest of it), and had left space for his own epitaph underneath that of his wife. I do not know whether it was written by one of his children, or whether they got some friend to write it for them. I do not believe that any satire was intended. I believe that it was the intention to convey that nothing short of the Day ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... has made an epitaph in honour of these our substantial topers, the Germans; the sense of which is, that if truth lies hidden in wine, they are the first people in the world that will find ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... subject of the piece. It is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We remember but two or three examples in English poetry; that of Chaucer, in the "House of Fame": Jonson's epitaph on his son,— ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson |
