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The altar-slabs are old, and may once have been taken from altar-tombs. There is a good tower-arch, a five-shafted font, and excellent wagon-shaped roofs; chancel-screen and reredos are modern. Of the two bells, one, the tenor, is the largest in Cornwall, with a diameter of 54 inches; it is said that there was formerly a peal, but that the bells were recast into this single form.
The church has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames, very eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts which Shakspeare has made his own.
It would have occupied a painstaking county historian a whole afternoon to take rubbings of the numerous effigies and heraldic devices graven to their memory on the brasses, tablets, and altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church. The Duke himself, however, was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles in stone and metal, even when they concerned his own beginnings.
The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in the morning sun: people going about their business in the day's primal freshness, which was just as fresh here as in younger villages; children, with milk-pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing leap-frog with the altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing itself for the day, which would be like myriads of other days that had passed over it, but yet would be worth living through.
The gates of the church-yard were open and free to all passengers, and the common footway of the towns-people seems to lie to and fro across it. It is paved, according to English custom, with flat tombstones; and there are also raised, or altar-tombs, some of which have armorial bearings on them.
North Street leads us into a network of small slums, and Paradise Street opens into a public recreation ground, laid out with trees and shrubs, where the children play among sombre altar-tombs of a past generation. This was formerly a cemetery, consecrated in 1733, and the Marylebone historian, Smith, says that more than 80,000 persons have been interred in it.
She could hardly feel any sorrow that the kind Frank was going away, so brimful was she of the thoughts of seeing his mother; who had grown strangely associated in her dreams, both sleeping and waking, with the still calm marble effigies that lay for ever clasping their hands in prayer on the altar-tombs in Combehurst church. All the week was one happy season of anticipation.
There are neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table, bearing the following inscription: "Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." MATTHEW xxiv. 44. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
His ambition, as ambition so often does, will over-reach itself, and he will have nothing to show but the unfinished fragments of a poetical Escurial instead of the finished chantries and altar-tombs which a less formal architect is able to boast.
But they knelt before the altar-tombs, not as before altars consecrated with relics of saints, but as before altars dedicated to God and connected with the memory of their own honored and beloved dead, whom he had called from them into his holy presence.
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