Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/212

 QUAINT EPITAPH. 187

After witnessing this act of bounty, and hoping that in the comfort it communicated, the living bread by which the soul is nourished might not be forgotten, we took a walk in the green and quiet churchyard. Among the antique tombstones, was one of a coarse, brown material, wrought into a double head, and commemo rating, in parallel lines, the birth and death of two females, the singular construction and orthography of whose epitaph is here transcribed :

&quot; Death creeps abought on hard, And steals abroad on seen, Ilur darts arc suding and hur arows Keen, Hur Strocks are deadly, com they soon or late, &quot;\Vlan being Strock, Repentance is to late, Death is a minut, full of suding sorrow, Then Live to day, as thou may st dy to Morrow. Anno Domony, 1690.&quot;

The native place of Shakspeare is not strikingly pic turesque, and the habitudes of its people reveal no dis tinctive character. We fancied that the urchins playing about the streets were somewhat more noisy and in subordinate than English children are wont to be. Possibly they were striving to be like the renowned bard, in those points of character most easily imitable. His name is in almost every mouth, and you can scarcely turn a corner but what some vestige of him meets the eye. It would seem that he, who through out life was the least ambitious, the most careless about his fame, of all distinguished men, was, by the very echo

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