"Here lyeth Menalcas as dead as a logge,

That lived like a divell and died like a dogge;
Here doth he lye, said I? then say I lye,
For from this place, he parted by and by.
But here he made his descent into hell
Without either book or candle or bell."

Which, as Camden kindly remarks, only proceeds from

66 an exulcerated mind."

A beautiful one on Prince

Henry (by Daniel ?) :

"Within this marble casket lies

A matchless jewel of rich prize
Whom Nature, in the worlds disdaine

But shewd and then put up againe."

Not unlike Wordsworth's "This child unto myself will

take."

Camden does not include Ben Jonson's noble

epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:

"Here beneath this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse." And so on.

But he does not forget the wonderful brevity of Sir Henry Wotton's on the wife of Sir Albert Morton

"He first deceas'd; she for a little tri'd

To live without him; liked it not, and di'd "

(though he does not mention either author or subject), or the exquisite lines of Raleigh and Chidick Tichborne on the nights before their execution in the Tower, which appear in Wotton's "Reliquiæ Wottonianæ."

One of John Hoskins' (who, you may remember, wrote a prefatory poem to Coryat's "Crudities" and, by the way, another to Owen's " Epigrams ") :

"Here lyeth John Cruker a maker of Bellowes,
His craftes-master and king of good-fellowes;
Yet when he came to the houre of his death,

He that made Bellowes, could not make breath."

Another (and how apt !) on a usurer :

"Here lyes ten in the hundred

In the ground fast ram'd:
"Tis an hundred to ten,

But his soule is damn'd.”

One on "A Puritanicall Lock-smith":

"A zealous lock-smith dyed of late,
And did arrive at heaven's gate,

He stood without and would not knocke
Because he meant to picke the locke."

Part of one on a shrew:

“And sure her soule is not in hell,
The divell could ne'er abide her ;
But I
suppose she's soared aloft,
For in the late great thunder,
Methought I heard her very voyce,
Rending the clouds asunder.”

A pleasant doggerel quatrain on Thomas Churchyard,

the poet :

"Come Alecto and lend me thy torch

To find a Church-yard in the Church-porch.
Poverty and poetry this tombe doth enclose
Therefore, Gentlemen, be merry in prose."

Camden does not include Marston's self-epitaph "Ob

livioni Sacrum," a really fine piece of pretentious bravado carried (for Marston posed all his life) gallantly into the grave. Nor that of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who only missed being a great poet by a hair's breadth, not through lack of feeling, as Lamb suggests, but through sheer faultiness in composition. "Fulke Grevil, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Frend to Sir Philip Sidney. Trophæum Peccati." How full of restrained pathos and nobility! Penultimately:

"Here lyes, the Lord have mercy upon her,
One of her Majesties maids of honour;
She was both young, slender and pretty,
She dyed a maid, the more the pitty."

And lastly, surely the briefest epitaph on record, that on Burbidge the tragedian: "Exit Burbidge.”

It is the old spirit rejuvenated of Lucian, who brings in Diogenes “laughing and out-laughing" King Mausolus "for that he was so pitifully pressed and crushed with an huge heape of stones under his stately monument Mausoleum." Not so Camden, even though he thought it rather plebeian to write in English. Let me commend him to you, dear X, and to such indifferent, courteous, modest readers as doe not think basely of the former ages, their country and countrimen." Most of the " in the seventeenth century are "Remaines merely posthumous miscellanies of the authors (such as Spelman, Herbert, and Wotton). But Camden's are something different.

numerous

XXXVIII

EPILOGUE

MY DEAR X,

I suppose that I ought to close an epistolary series of this kind by making my epitaph-by putting the lid on the dustbin with a ringing slam. I suggest, then, a few platitudes worth reaffirming because we have forgotten them. The artist is an extremely important member of the community, and it makes for the salvation of the country that both the artist and the community be conscious of it. Germany has been educated in the wrong ideas; we have been educated in none. No system of education, therefore, will affect the mentality and the happiness of our countrymen unless art, the Carter Paterson of ideas, circulates through the community.* Art, however, can only flourish in a free community; it languishes when "made tongue-tied by authority." Even though for generations it succeed not in propagating good ideas but in destroying false ones, even though its office, that is to say, be purely critical, it will have done a work a thousandfold greater than the work of armies and politicians. Should it only check, for instance, the diffusion of those very up-to-date maxims-that it does not matter what you think but what you do, and that *N.B.-In other words, art and industry ought to be the same thing.

books and the art of the past are à contradiction of reality-it will have won a permanent though bloodless victory.

But the artist, though of his age, must at the same time be remote from it. His business is with God, with life, and with beauty, and only indirectly with their perversions in 1916. His art is there to adjust his relation with contemporary life, to teach him to get his period into the right perspective, and to maintain an equilibrium between his departure from and approach to it, between the past and the future and the present. This distance should aid him, in the first place, to form a style, irrespective of contemporary fashions, firmly but delicately measured to his ideas, and made cogent and harmonious by his inheritance from artistic tradition. It should, in the second place, supply him with that occasion for study and reflection, whose fruits will be gradually stored into general principles and convictions, into a philosophy, whether of art, moral ideas, or life, which will direct his imagination and give a backing, a meaning, and a purpose to his creative force. For he is of his age to form the taste of his age; he is the messenger of order, sanity, freedom, and repose to a people stampeding within their iron pens.

But something there must be to hold the artist back from solidifying those general principles into a cold rigidity, into idolatry, into a nescience. I will give you an example of what I mean-not from art but from morality, which is more susceptible to icy formulations. How many irreproachable moralists have not of recent years erected the religious fetich of the State-with a hard, tenacious completeness that would have sent Hobbes