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Updated: June 23, 2025
In the churchyard at Cobham, a village made famous by the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, is a gravestone recording the death of a carpenter, having at the head a shield bearing three compasses to serve as his crest, and under it the usual tools of his trade square, mallet, compasses, wedge, saw, chisel, hammer, gimlet, plane, and two-foot rule.
No primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath, and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study, truly they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded on a gravestone in Watertown.
I don't suppose my comic pieces are very laughable; at any rate the man who makes a business of writing me down says the last one I wrote is very melancholy reading, and that if it was only a little better perhaps some bereaved person might pick out a line or two that would do to put on a gravestone. Well, that is hard, I must confess. Do let me see those lines which excite such sad emotions.
But, better even than Wingfold himself, that poor physical failure of a man could have helped her from under every gravestone that was now crushing the life out of her not so much from superiority of intellect, certainly not from superiority of learning, but mainly because he was alive all through, because the life eternal pervaded every atom of his life, every thought, every action.
It is certain, I believe, that the original stone did not bear the name of Shakespeare, any more than its successor: but it is not certain that the four lines appear upon the new stone in exactly the same literal form as they did upon the old one. I wish I could add that these two were the only occasions when either grave or gravestone was meddled with.
The Great Woodpecker expressed the thought of the whole assembly when after breakfast he said: "Now I want to go and see that grave. I believe Yan wrote his name on some old cow that was lying down and she didn't like it and said so out loud!" They arrived at the spot in a few minutes. Yes, there it was plainly written on the rude gravestone, rather shaky, but perfectly legible "Yan."
There is little doubt that the practice originated in an endeavour to imitate on the common gravestone the nobler memorials of the churches and cathedrals, the effort being more or less successful in proportion to the individual skill of the artist.
And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one, with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know that I lived an honest man and died a Christian."
The weight of these heavy marbles, though unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearily upon the spirit of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea of death with the dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of with the freedom of the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is the visible symbol of a mistaken system.
In the later half of the eighteenth century greater pains and finer workmanship appear to have been bestowed upon the symbolic figurement of the gravestone, and the more elaborate allegorical representations of which a few sketches have been given came into vogue and grew in popular favour until the century's end.
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