"Epitaph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drag me out of my grave and give me a public funeral; don't take advantage of my having no voice to raise in my own defense, and insult me by a national statue. No! do me justice on my tombstone; dash me off, in one masterly sentence, on my epitaph. Here lies Wragge, embalmed in the tardy recognition of his species: he plowed, sowed, and reaped his fellow-creatures; and enlightened posterity congratulates him on the uniform excellence of ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... nothing to commend that particular act of Jonathan's conjunction in war with his father. David in his epitaph speaks much to the commendation of both Saul and Jonathan, as of excellent warriors, and of Jonathan as a kind and constant friend to him, but there is nothing touched of that point. If that place be pressed, it will follow with much more evidence, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature: - and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... years.' Well and good, what then? 'I will say to my soul, Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.' Yes, what then? 'This night thy soul shall be required of thee.' He never thought of that! And so his epitaph was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... wrecked—just about the time, I fancy, when you, Doctor, and myself were in long petticoats and making some noise in the world; the book was not written by Captain Wilson, but by Keates, the sentimentalist. At the very end, however, is an epitaph, and that was written by the captain ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... releasing his people from any possible abuse of an authority which is always dangerous, when those who exercise it are at too great a distance from the Sovereign. This Prince, endowed with every virtue, had no other wish than that of deserving after his death the noble epitaph of that Persian monarch who has graved upon his tomb, "Weep! ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the memory ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... employed in the acting of plays in the time of Elizabeth. These are the "troops of children, little eyasses" alluded to by Shakespeare in "Hamlet." They sometimes acted in plays written for them by Lyly and others, and sometimes in the popular dramas of the day. Ben Jonson wrote a charming epitaph on Salathiel Pavy, one of these little actors, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... his side. "Is this going to be my epitaph?" he groaned; for he was not a man particular in his diet, or exacting in choice of roes, or panting for freshness in an egg. He wondered what his landlady could mean by sending up to him, that morning of all others, to tempt his appetite after her fashion. "I thought I remembered eating nothing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... St. Mary of Cleeve, in Somersetshire, willing to show their sense of obligation to him and Canon Moore, gave yearly to the Dean and Chapter the sum of L6 13s. 4d. to be spent in celebrating their anniversary. Sylke's tomb represents a very ghostly figure with the epitaph, "Sum quod eris, fueram quod es, pro me, precor, ora." The chantry is in the style of the later Gothic, and is one of those "final touches" to the cathedral Archdeacon Freeman esteems so happily imparted to it. The ancient works of the thirteenth-century ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... the world to such a strain That it should deluge once again. But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies More from Briareus' hands, than Argus' eyes, I'll sing thy obsequies with trumpet sounds, And write thy epitaph with blood and wounds.] There seems now to be a general cease of talk, it being taken for granted that Monk do resolve to stand to the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... that Michael Chamillard, the Minister of War, introduced billiards into France by the way of Versailles. He played with Louis XIV and pleased him greatly, but Chamillard was no statesman, as history and the following lines from his epitaph point out. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... testimony of utter want of all the marks by which we know him—the Burns-stamp, so to speak, which is visible on all that ever came from his pen. Misled by his handwriting, I inserted in my former edition of his works an epitaph, beginning ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... for a moment or so, we will introduce him to a very interesting relic in the shape of a Latin Aristotle of 1526, in which a Cistercian monk of Kinloss Abbey, Andrew Langland, has enshrined two metrical compositions from his own pen; an epitaph on the Regent Murray, and an epistle to Joannes Ferrerius, Professor at Kinloss, 1542, and continuator of Hector Boece. The epitaph is dialogue-wise between the Bishop of Orkney, who was absent from the funeral, and ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Thumb; but the King and the Court were so sorry at the loss of their little favourite that they went into mourning for him. And they put a fine white marble monument over his grave whereon was carven the following epitaph: ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... to meddle with local autonomy would not only defeat its purpose, but would be chiselling its own epitaph." . . . The parish and diocesan units are and must ever remain supreme, each in its own sphere. We could never get a better working basis; more genuine Christian charity and self sacrifice could not be met with outside of our acting brotherhoods and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... by hour—the broken people, the vicious people, the cripples, the white slaves of crueler days than the most barbarous countries in history have ever permitted to their children? You understand your jobs, and you do yourselves well; that's your motto and your epitaph. There's only one amongst you who's a people's man ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his epitaph, Sublimely simple, nobly plain; Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be said of the discourse of Lysias? See whether you can find any more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which is said by some to have been inscribed on the grave of ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... in 1630, tells of one travelling through Stratford, "a town most remarkable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare." In the same year is said to have been written Milton's memorable epitaph (printed 1632), a noble testimony from the Puritan genius to the ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... and gratitude of the people, than the poorest piece of human clay in the potter's field. The great leveller had passed his rule over him as he passes it over every one of us. The dead lion was less now than the living dog, and the Golden Dog itself was henceforth only a memory, and an epitaph forever of the tragedy of this ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... in the church when we reached it, so we took our accustomed ramble through the graveyard surrounding it. The Story Girl had brought flowers for her mother's grave as usual, and while she arranged them on it the rest of us read for the hundredth time the epitaph on Great-Grandfather King's tombstone, which had been composed by Great-Grandmother King. That epitaph was quite famous among the little family traditions that entwine every household with mingled mirth and sorrow, smiles ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... corrupted," unfortunately, many interesting antiquities in iron, so that only a limited number of specimens of this metal have come down to us from very early times; one of the earliest in England is a grave-stone of cast metal, of the date 1350: it is decorated with a cross, and has the epitaph, "Pray for the soul of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... choice of burial in an Egyptian coffin, for he merely followed the example of his royal father, Tabnith, "priest of 'Ashtart and king of the Sidonians", whose sarcophagus, preserved at Constantinople, still bears in addition to his own epitaph that of its former occupant, a certain Egyptian general Penptah. But more instructive than these borrowed memorials is a genuine example of Phoenician work, the stele set up by Yehaw-milk, king of Byblos, and dating from the fourth or fifth century B.C.(2) In the sculptured ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... The charming piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been republished in the Tales from Blackwood; and the mono-rhymed epitaph on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature, but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different publications; ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... his tomb nothing except his name; but a wandering Englishman, who heard his story, and recollected the grave of another who died with his work undone, has rudely scratched at the base, near the ground, where the grass half hides it, an epitaph for him—Plura moliebatur. And he told Big Todd, whom he chanced to find smoking his evening pipe hard by, that it meant "He ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all Nations have wished that certain external signs should point out the places where their dead are interred. Among savage tribes unacquainted with letters this has mostly been done either by rude stones ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... with splendour. The body, having been conveyed, in compliance with Sir Robert's last directions, to Dublin, was there laid within the ancient walls of St. Audoen's Church—where I have read the epitaph, telling the age and titles of the departed dust. Neither painted escutcheon, nor marble slab, have served to rescue from oblivion the story of the dead, whose very name will ere long moulder from ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "Epigoni" in seven thousand verses beginning: 'And now, Muses, let us begin to sing of men of later days'; for some say that these poems also are by Homer. Now Xanthus and Gorgus, son of Midas the king, heard his epics and invited him to compose a epitaph for the tomb of their father on which was a bronze figure of a maiden bewailing the death of Midas. He wrote the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Val was in Newgate thrown, He carved his name on the dungeon stone; Quoth a dubsman, who gazed on the shattered wall, "You have carved your epitaph, Claude Du Val, With your ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... wits, even of Foote and Quin themselves; while the sleek landlord wiped the cobwebs off another magnum of that grand old port, and took in all the wisdom with a quiet twinkle of his sleepy eye? He rests now, good old man, among the yews beside his forefathers; and on his tomb his lengthy epitaph, writ by himself; for Barker was ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... churchyard high above the German Ocean are three small monuments placed by some loving friends of those who lie beneath. To no one more truly can the epitaph be applied than that which is cut on each tomb—that of the brother, of the sister, and of the ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, might be accused of profane confidence in the strength and number of his kindred. In peace, the earls of Devon resided in their numerous castles and manors of the west; their ample revenue was appropriated to devotion and hospitality; and the epitaph of Edward, surnamed from his misfortune, the blind, from his virtues, the good, earl, inculcates with much ingenuity a moral sentence, which may, however, be abused by thoughtless generosity. After a grateful commemoration of the fifty-five years of union and happiness ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... man, she was almost a son to her great father; and yet, instead of the sonorous epitaph that is inscribed beside her tomb, perhaps a truer one would be the words ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... his lyre and one of his best compositions lie neglected on the ground. Upon the pediment of the table are placed two female ideal figures in relief, representing love and pity, entwined each in the arms of the other; the proper emblems of the genius of his poetry." It bears the following epitaph ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... these mountebanks dead, be this epitaph read, "The Gods, Priests and Oracles buried beneath, Who were ever at strife which should lie most in life, Here lie all alike in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... patients, among them two Presidents of Harvard College, Charles Chauncy and Leonard Hoar,—and Thomas Thacher, first minister of the "Old South," author of the earliest medical treatises printed in the country,[A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People in Small pox and Measles. 1674.] whose epitaph in Latin and Greek, said to have been written by Eleazer, an "Indian Youth" and a member of the Senior Class of Harvard College, may be found in the "Magnalia." I miss this noble savage's name in our triennial catalogue; and as there is many a slip between the cup and lip, one is tempted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... He needs no long and fulsome epitaph carved in marble to tell his worth. Did his memory depend upon that alone, the marble would crumble into dust, mingle with his, and his name pass away with the stone that man vainly thought would preserve it. No; his monument is a world made free, and ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... softened the spirits which a love of riot and rapine inflamed into excesses so often ending in death. We have wept over her grave; and who that has seen the old stone in Henderland churchyard—now broken in three pieces, but bearing still that epitaph which Longinus would have pronounced sublime, "Here lies Parys of Cockburn, and his wife Marjory"—and looked on the old ruins of their castle, now scarcely sufficient for a resting place for the grey owl—could resist the rising emotion, or quell ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... a young, beautiful, and amiable partner, at a period so interesting, was the probable reason of her husband devoting his fortune to a charitable institution. The epitaph occurs in Strype's edition of Stewe's Survey of London, Book ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... disposition, but because you have a noble and confiding heart. Believe me, generosity and confidence are the worst failings with which a man can be tainted in this world—failings which always insure destruction, and have only mockery and derision for an epitaph. You are no longer to be helped, duchess. You are on the borders of an abyss, into which you will smilingly plunge, dragging us all after you. Well, peace be with you! My sufferings have lately been so great, that I can only thank you for furnishing me with ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... car stopped. Its headlights illuminated the upright flat stone which marked the last resting place of the great chemist, and in that light not only was the name of the sleeper clearly read but the less distinct but legible epitaph: ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... and signed articles of peace at Kilkenny, were not spared; and the excuse offered was, that the Act of Parliament overrode the articles. One of the gentlemen thus betrayed was Lord Trimbleston, and his tomb may still be seen in the ruined Abbey of Kilconnell, with the epitaph:— ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... old fellow. You've done your best, and none of us can do more. You know the soldier's epitaph—'Here lies one who tried to do his duty'—a prince could not have better, and you deserve that ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... with such reckless profusion amongst the characters, intended as a covert satire upon the vulgar English worship of wealth, or did they imply a genuine instinct for the sumptuous? Disraeli would apparently parody the old epitaph, and write upon the monument of every ducal millionaire, 'Of such are the kingdom of heaven.' Vast landed estates and the Christian virtues, according to him, naturally go together; and he never dismisses a hero without giving him such ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... comprehend that an atom,—say, of hydrogen,—which is proud of its personality, will never merge in a molecule of water. The familiar verse: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" echoes Adam's epitaph to this day:— ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... (1492-1544), also a rare painter, with a finely coloured and finely drawn "Disputa," No. 63. This painter seems to have had the same devotion to his master, Lorenzo di Credi, that di Credi had for his master, Verrocchio. Vasari calls Sogliani a worthy religious man who minded his own affairs—a good epitaph. His work is rarely met with in Florence, but he has a large fresco at S. Marco. Lorenzo di Credi (1459-1537) himself has two pretty circular paintings here, of which No. 1528 is particularly sweet: "The Virgin and Child with St. John and Angels," all comfortable and happy ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... noble, who was chancellor at the time. It is interesting both from the point of view of the carving and costume, and as showing the apparatus of an alchemist's laboratory. Close by it on the wall is the "metrical epitaph," which De Diversis says the chancellor composed. The columns, which are of Curzola marble, belong to the earlier building, though the entasis shows that classical feeling was beginning to affect even architects who worked in Gothic. ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... nothing to us if we lift up between Him and us the black barrier of unbelief, and so dam back the stream that was meant to give life to all the world and life to us. Christ infinitely desires to bless us, but He cannot unless we trust Him. I beseech you, do not let this be the epitaph on your tombstone:—'Christ could there do no mighty ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the world, their grave, Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed, Gibbering at living men, and idly rave, 'We only truly live, but ye are dead.' Alas! poor fools, the anointed eye may trace A dead soul's epitaph in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... ceased to be the town-talk. The trick was so audacious and on so grand a scale that nobody thought for an instant of connecting us lads with it. Suspicion at length grew weary of lighting on the wrong person, and as conjecture—like the physicians in the epitaph—was in vain, the Rivermouthians gave up the idea of finding out who ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... old epitaph will be found of such impressive though simple language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the child of an ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... thrill'd and turned in sudden fright, Whilst in her eyes there shot a fitful ray, That scorched the tears up with its flashing light. He was a weak old man, and time's decay Stood on his brow and thin locks snowy white, And trembling hands that shook upon his staff, As though, alive, they wrote their epitaph. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... at Handsworth was "under the chancel window," sixty years ago, overgrown with moss and weeds, but inscription and stone have long since gone. Baskerville's own epitaph, on the Mausoleum in his grounds at Easy Hill, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... fulfilment of my great idea. I wandered among the graves, and read the epitaphs, the reiterated dreary expressions of disappointment and despair, that the deceased had been passively torn from a world to which every fibre of their hearts was clinging. Not so would read my epitaph, and I began to compose it, less as a witty amusement than as a device for resisting an insidious chill that had begun to creep over me like a damp exhalation from the graves. For my imagination suddenly pictured to itself the heavy tombstone pressing down, down forever, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... still drove him on, and he went by way of Larissa, as being the most convenient road. Here, the Cumans say, he composed an epitaph on Gordius, king of Phrygia, which has however, and with greater probability, been attributed ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and all noble aspirations checked, until in middle age we find only the dried-up, cauterized, wizened soul, taught by dread experience to be reticent and cautious, and to allow splendid opportunities to pass unutilized rather than risk the chances of one defeat. And the epitaph on these dead souls is: Foris ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... preservation before the Calvinists of 1562 began a destruction which was completed by the Revolution. An inscription, however, was left on an adjacent pillar, and this was copied by Dugdale. The ostrich feathers and the order of the garter were shown upon the brass besides the epitaph. In 1866 his coffin was found still in its original position on the right side of the altar, and nothing more is now ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... there. While eating the fruit he had culled and drinking choice wine, he put into his mouth a poisoned fig, which he had inadvertently gathered, and quickly died in convulsions. Before passing away, however, he is said to have composed his own epitaph. This M. Mazade believes he has found. It reads: "The manes of Sulpicia Pallas have avenged her. Here lies Lucius Horatillavus, physician, who poisoned himself." If the epitaph is genuine, it is a confession of guilt. The death of the quack by his own poison is ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... "Yet this much curse I must send you, in the behalfe of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet: and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph." ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... are memorials to the man who lies just there beyond this grave where today we place his mother. On that slab we find only the dates of birth and death and the name of Hamilton Burton; but when I look at it, I seem to read a nobler epitaph in letters of bronze which no weather can dim or tarnish. I seem to read—'Here lies one who put aside a blazing dream to cast his lot into a life of humbler duty.' If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one had grown before has done ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... which struck him as startling in view of his quest. He dropped down, brushed away the grass, and lo, his search was ended—indeed his eyes had not deceived him. There before his eyes was the humble epitaph: "Amalie Canfield, aged four ...
— Two Wonderful Detectives - Jack and Gil's Marvelous Skill • Harlan Page Halsey
... had been before them. Mr Pontifex had during his own lifetime set up a monument in Elmhurst Church to the memory of his wife (a slab with urns and cherubs like illegitimate children of King George the Fourth, and all the rest of it), and had left space for his own epitaph underneath that of his wife. I do not know whether it was written by one of his children, or whether they got some friend to write it for them. I do not believe that any satire was intended. I believe that it ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... to Mr. Pulteney: "I will do an unmannerly thing, which is to bequeath you an epitaph for forty years hence, in two words, ultimus Britannorum. You never forsook your party. You might often have been as great as the court can make any man so; but you preserved your spirit of liberty when your former colleagues had ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... features contained in this epitaph: (1) He believes in the resurrection; (2) he does not care what man thinks of him, it is God who shall decide whether he was ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... Regent Morton's famous epitaph spoken by Knox's grave, is an imperfect echo of what the Reformer ten days before, in bidding farewell to the Kirk (Session) of Edinburgh, had said of his own past career:—'In respect that he bore God's message, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... was born at Upsala in Sweden, in the month of January, 1688, according to various authors,—in 1689, according to his epitaph. His father was Bishop of Skara. Swedenborg lived eighty-five years; his death occurred in London, March 29, 1772. I use that term to convey the idea of a simple change of state. According to his disciples, Swedenborg was seen at Jarvis and in Paris after ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... so no longer. You may read his verse, And judge if mine be better or be worse: Read and pronounce! The meed of praise is thine; But still let his be his and mine be mine. I say no more; but how can you for- swear Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well; [106] So, too, the epitaph which still you read? Think you they faced my sepulchre with lies — Gross lies, so evident and palpable That every townsman must have wot of it, And not a worshipper within the church But must ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... When he saw this epitaph, Angus's hair really stood on end with fright, and on the day he found that the boat was gone, leaving no trace, he became absolutely terror-stricken. He sought for it behind every rock and in every likely nook about the lake, ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been {85} dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty—the ancient symmetry, symmetria prisca as a humanist designs it in his epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci—was but a matter of numbers. For a man's length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from finger tip to finger tip as his length when erect from head to feet, namely, eight times the length of his head. ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Mr. Clay against the Southern Democrats in the angry contest of 1850, declaring that "if the Union must be dismembered" he "prayed God that its ruins might be the monument of his own grave." He "desired no epitaph to tell that he survived it." Against the madness of repealing the Missouri Compromise he entered a protest and a warning. He notified his Southern friends that the dissolution of the Union might be involved in the dangerous step. He alone, of the Southern Democrats ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to cut off a lock of her hair. As the cart moved slowly through the raging streets, he said to her, "You must find the way long." "No," she answered, "I am not afraid of being late." They say that Vergniaud pronounced this epitaph: "She has killed us, but she has taught us all how ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... already entered the town, were compelled to retreat; and the joyful nations celebrated Huniades and Belgrade as the bulwarks of Christendom. [33] About a month after this great deliverance, the champion expired; and his most splendid epitaph is the regret of the Ottoman prince, who sighed that he could no longer hope for revenge against the single antagonist who had triumphed over his arms. On the first vacancy of the throne, Matthias Corvinus, a youth ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... absent, to write a series of epitaphs upon him (his "country dialect" and his awkward person) was agreed to, and put in practice by several of the guests. The active aggressors appear to have been Garrick, Doctor Bernard, Richard Burke, and Caleb Whitefoord. Cumberland says he, too, wrote an epitaph; but it was complimentary and grave, and hence the grateful return he received. Mr. Forster considers Garrick's epitaph to indicate the tone of all. This, with the rest, was read to Goldsmith when he next appeared at the St. James's Coffee-house, where Cumberland, however, says he never ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... rhythm. But the best of it is equal as poetry, and perhaps superior as meaning. And it admirably completes in verse the tribute long before paid by Old Mortality in prose, to the 'last and best of Scots,' as Dryden called him in the noble epitaph,[46] which not improbably inspired Scott himself to do what he could to remove the vulgar aspersions on the fame of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... their serious motives, not wholly known to those who perpetrate the jokes. If unconscious of the forces really leading to the episode, little did they dream that its results would live till now, and to all intents for ever. Each wrote an epitaph on Noll, and he in turn an epitaph on all. The Retaliation shows his power in compressed expression, and his fine discernment of men and character. The little poem lives, a veritable, and, in its way, a wholesale contribution to national biography. It is a candid ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found at least one Certainty—that of being "among the English poets." He would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... recent excursion in Cumberland, I copied the following epitaph from the album kept at the inn at Pooley Bridge, the landlord of which is well known, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... the porch had turned red, and the maples in the door-yard yellow, the flower-pots were removed to the warm cellar, and one winter evening Sammy Ray wrote Greeny's epitaph:— ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her melts away in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... a mediocre painter in his day and painted the whole wall (on the left hand as one enters) of the Pieve of San Gimignano with stories of the Old Testament; in which work, which in truth was not very good, there may still be read in the middle this epitaph: ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... have no loves: They cannot curse nor laugh— Their hearts die in their youth with neither Grave nor epitaph. ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... Cary, "though I gave evidence as ordered by the court-martial. But I rather think that I have here Hagan's epitaph." He took out his pocket-book, and drew forth a slip of paper upon which was gummed a brief newspaper cutting. This he handed to me, and ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... peculiar nitrogenous matter, protein. Thus the plant is the ideal proletaire of the living world, the worker who produces; the animal, the ideal aristocrat, who mostly occupies himself in consuming, after the manner of that noble representative of the line of Zaehdarm, whose epitaph is ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... to Springfield, Illinois, where they rest at the foot of a small hill in Oakwood Cemetery. A simple monument, with the name—"Lincoln"—upon it, is the only epitaph of him, who next to Washington was the greatest ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... tying up some slender stalk to its stick with the smallest thread, and he had a reverent way of laying a bulb or seed in the ground, and then gently shaping and smoothing a small mound over it, which made the little inscription on the stick above more like an affecting epitaph than ever. Much of this gentleness may have been that apology for his great strength, common with large men; but his face was distinctly amiable, and his very light blue eyes were at times wistful and doglike in their kindliness. I was soon to learn, however, that placability ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... that "the loss of the youth of the city was as if the spring was taken out of the year," because the beauty of the idea can in no way suffer by presenting it in English, French, or German rather than in the original Greek. Again, to quote another instance from Latin, the fine epitaph to St. Ovinus in Ely Cathedral: "Lucem tuam Ovino da, Deus, et requiem," loses nothing of its terse pathos by being rendered into English. Occasionally, indeed, the truth is forced upon us that even in prose "a thing may be ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... others; let them grind their teeth, let them froth and foam at the mouth, let them tremble with rage, let them shake their heads with an air of majesty, as if they would say to the Church, "We bury you to-morrow, we write your epitaph and chant your De Profundis; our league is mighty, our forces are multitudinous, our weapons are powerful, our bravery ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... and 1653).—Ed. [6] Arnauld.—This was Antoine Arnauld, doctor of the Sorbonne, and one of the Arnaulds famous among the Port Royalists, who were Jansenists in opposition to the Jesuits. He was born in 1612, and died a voluntary exile in Belgium, 1694. Boileau wrote his epitaph.—Ed. [7] Escobar.—A Spanish Jesuit, who flourished mostly in France, and wrote against the Jansenists. Pascal, as well as La Fontaine, ridiculed his convenient principles of morality, he "chemin de velours," as La Fontaine puts it. His chief work in moral theology ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... necessary? Why were the greenbacks issued? Why were the bonds sold? Who brought about "a critical period of our financial affairs"? How has the Democratic party "averted disaster"? How could there be a disaster with a vast surplus in the treasury? Can you find in the graveyard of nations this epitaph: "Died of a Surplus"? Has any nation ever been known to perish because it had too much gold and too much silver, and because its credit was better than that of any other nation on the earth? The Democrats seem to think—and it is greatly to their credit—that ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was, during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation now ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... enough a personal experience, but the comment should have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few stranger things in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man's pathos. Even Keats's epitaph—Here lies one whose name was writ in water—finds an echo in David Gray's Below lies one whose name was traced in sand. Poor Gray was at least ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... over, vain the loser's sigh. To thy parting lover, wave a gay good-by! 'Neath the storm-cloud bending, see the lily laugh. If Love's reign be ending—write his epitaph! Deck his grave with iris; blot away his name. Isis and Osiris, make thy ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... of years; and with the utmost tranquillity and resignation, quietly sunk into the arms of death on the 16th of February 1754. To whom may, with the greatest propriety, be applied a part of the epitaph inscribed to the memory of ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... fascinating little place. It consists only of a few cottages, shy and red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows, with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... a most splendid monument to her departed lord over the family vault of the Bluebeards. The rector, Dr. Sly, who had been Mr. Bluebeard's tutor at college, wrote an epitaph in the most pompous yet pathetic Latin: "Siste, viator! moerens conjux, heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse"; in a word, everything that is usually said in epitaphs. A bust of the departed saint, with Virtue mourning ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... II. and Colley Cibber, Esq. Stella in Mourning To Stella Verses Written at the Request of a Gentleman to whom a Lady had given a Sprig of Myrtle To Lady Firebrace, at Bury Assizes To Lyce, an Elderly Lady On the Death of Mr Robert Levett, a Practiser in Physic Epitaph on Claude Phillips, an Itinerant Musician Epitaph on Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart. On the Death of Stephen Grey, F.R.S., the Electrician To Miss Hickman, Playing on the Spinnet Paraphrase of Proverbs, chap. iv. verses 6-11 Horace, Lib. iv. Ode vii. Translated ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... no sound, he rolled over, and was stark dead. It was all over while Esther spoke these words of epitaph. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... say—I am going to my cold and silent grave—my lamp of life is nearly extinguished—my race is run—the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world: it is—the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no man who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... supposed the tower and spire to have been built by the generosity of one NICHOLAS, an ENGLISHMAN." Mons. Licquet has, I think, reclaimed the true author of such munificence, as his own countryman.—NICOLAS LANGLOIS:—whose name thus occurs in his epitaph, preserved ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... The epitaphs on the tombs of the ancients usually contained the name of the person, his age, and (with the Greeks) some account of the principal events of his life. Halcyone, in her affectionate grief, promises her husband, at least, an honorary funeral, and a share in her own epitaph.] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... betraying secrets or giving the game away, the employes know exactly what to expect. More than one would-be witness has disappeared; his epitaph is, 'Found drowned.' Ah, I see FitzGerald moving, and so you must take your departure out of this inferno into ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... The Epitaph of the valiant Esquire M. Peter Read in the south Ile of Saint Peters Church in the citie of Norwich, which was knighted by Charles the fift at the winning of Tunis in the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... human laws and obligations—and yet he was religious, or esteemed so—received the viaticum, and died full of years and honors, hugging salvation to his sinful heart. And after death he has yon lying epitaph to record his virtues. His virtues! ha, ha! Ask him who preaches to the kneeling throng gathering within this holy place what shall be the murderer's portion—and he will answer—Death! And yet Sir Reginald was long-lived. The awful question, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... death from the cold heart which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief—boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady, so lovely, so loving, so unhappy! you have had countless champions; millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your tragedy, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pictures, and is the sleeping place of many distinguished dead; but one tomb within the chancel absorbs all the attention of the stranger. For hundreds of years the world has looked upon the unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William Shakspeare, and read the epitaph written by himself: ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in Piraeus—Thucydides shall make his epitaph!" ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... through the iron gates of the Copp's Hill burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,—to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"—to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... abundance of water has evoked the usual comparison with Venice. Thomas Fuller, who for the sake of his usual sagacity may be forgiven an allusion so unfounded, says: "This mindeth me of an epitaph made on Mr. Francis Hill, a native of Salisbury, who died secretary to the English liege at Venice—'Born in the English Venice, thou did'st die, dear Friend, in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White |
