elf may die.'

And, talking of epitaphs, one is reminded of the quaint comment by Sir
Henry Wotton 'On the Death of Sir A. Morton's Wife':

'He first deceased; she, for a little, tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died'--

surely a piece of work as nearly as possible perfect in its way. In the
matter of inscriptions, we have, of course, that by Ben Jonson on
Shakespeare's portrait, and that by Dryden under Milton's picture--the
last-named being by no means deserving of its reputation. We have also
the well-known lines by Pope, 'written on glass with Lord Chesterfield's
diamond pencil;' the equally well-known sentence on Rogers by Lord
Holland; and the less-hackneyed and even more flattering couplet
composed by Lord Lyttelton for Lady Suffolk's bust (erected in a wood at
Stowe):

'Her wit and beauty for a Court were made,
But truth and goodness fit her for a shade.'

The writers of verse have naturally shone in such concentrated
testimonies to the merits of those whom they delighted to honour. Our
literature is full of eloquent and graceful summaries of individual
gifts and acquirements, apart altogether from the ordinary inscription
or epitaph. Pope celebrated Lady Wortley Montagu's beauty in a couple of
lines too frequently cited to need reproduction. Less often quoted is
David Graham's concise but sufficient criticism on Richardson's
'Clarissa':

'This work is Nature's; every tittle in't
She wrote, and gave it Richardson to print.'

James Montgomery, in a well-turned quatrain, said of Burns that he
'pass'd through life ... a brilliant trembling northern light,' but that
'thro' years to come' he would shine from far 'a fix'd unsetting polar
star.' It will be remembered that, in another quatrain, Lord Erskine
besought his contemporaries to 'mourn not for Anacreon dead,' for they
rejoiced in the possession of 'an Anacreon Moore.' James Smith wrote of
Miss Edgeworth that her work could never be anonymous--'Thy writings ...
must bring forth the name of their author to light.' And so on, and so
on: the poetry of compliment presents many such conceits.

A treatise, indeed, might be written on the epigraphs in which poets
have praised their lady-loves or their friends--from Herrick's Julia to,
say, Tennyson's General Gordon. Rather, however, let us turn to what the
bards have been at pains to say about themselves, recalling, for
example, Herrick's 'Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste