There were hundreds
more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated.
There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies--widows and
spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to
die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or
their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the
abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His
early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety,
inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them
many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These
prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in
very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath?
He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in
Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health,
"caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"!
If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey
authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe;
if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to
suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities,
which ought never to have been placed there, should now be
removed and placed in some vault where the relations or
descendants of the persons described could find, and if they
wished it, have them removed?
But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair
number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I
admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the
most appropriate epitaph ever written.
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