being intended
for a tomb-stone; but there is nothing in the verse that would suggest
such a thought. The composition is in the style of those laboured
portraits in words which we sometimes see placed at the bottom of a
print to fill up lines of expression which the bungling Artist had left
imperfect. We know from other evidence that Lord Lyttleton dearly loved
his wife; he has indeed composed a monody to her memory which proves
this, and she was an amiable woman; neither of which facts could have
been gathered from these inscriptive verses. This epitaph would derive
little advantage from being translated into another style as the former
was; for there is no under current; no skeleton or staminae of thought
and feeling. The Reader will perceive at once that nothing in the heart
of the Writer had determined either the choice, the order or the
expression, of the ideas; that there is no interchange of action from
within and from without; that the connections are mechanical and
arbitrary, and the lowest kind of these--heart and eyes: petty
alliterations, as meek and magnanimous, witty and wise, combined with
oppositions in thoughts where there is no necessary or natural
opposition. Then follow voice, song, eloquence, form, mind--each
enumerated by a separate act as if the Author had been making a
_Catalogue Raisonne_.

These defects run through the whole; the only tolerable verse is,

Her speech was the melodious voice of love.

Observe, the question is not which of these epitaphs is better or worse;
but which faults are of a worse kind. In the former case we have a
mourner whose soul is occupied by grief and urged forward by his
admiration. He deems in his simplicity that no hyperbole can transcend
the perfections of her whom he has lost; for the version which I have
given fairly demonstrates that, in spite of his outrageous expressions,
the under current of his thoughts was natural and pure. We have
therefore in him the example of a mind during the act of composition
misled by false taste to the highest possible degree; and, in that of
Lord Lyttleton, we have one of a feeling heart, not merely misled, but
wholly laid asleep by the same power. Lord Lyttleton could not have
written in this way upon such a subject, if he had not been seduced by
the example of Pope, whose sparkling and tuneful manner had bewitched
the men of letters his contemporaries, and corrupted the judgment of the
nation through all ranks of soci