Everybody's Book of Epitaphs: Being for the Most Part What the Living Think of the Dead

Epitaphs were for centuries looked upon as being as necessary as dying: or – if the necessity of death be doubted – as necessary as funerals. At any rate they held as important a place in the funereal etiquette of the past as the pomp and show appear to hold in many cases today. Very seldom, however, was the epitaph a record of fact or an expression of hope. Much oftener – and if it were only occasionally it would be too often – they had no relation to fact; they recorded no past, and seldom did they depict a past that ought to have been. Sometimes they were written by their subject, who feared to leave his reputation to his surviving friends and to – truth; sometimes they were written by an expert in that kind of literature for the pay that it brought him; sometimes too they were the work of some sincere if misguided friend; and sometimes they were the outcome of a remorse which sought to make up for its indifference during the lifetime of the departed by a fulsome enumeration of his real or supposed good qualities after death. And generally, by whomsoever written, epitaphs were an attempt to record on behalf of the dead. Very rarely indeed among the better kind do we find epitaphs free from “self” assertion, either on the part of the departed, or those responsible for the erection of the memorial – which often records the generosity of the latter as ostentatiously as the virtues of the former.