Читать книгу History of Madeley including Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, and Coalport онлайн

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Mailed and full-length fine stone figures of this highly-distinguished family, who lived here, and shed a lustre on the place, formerly reposed in the church, to whose sacred keeping they bequeathed their dust. Equally vain, however, were their bequests and hopes, for when the originals were no longer able to put a copper on the plate their very tombs were destroyed, and their stone effigies ruthlessly turned out of doors, and placed in niches outside the church, where, shorn of a portion of their limbs, they still do penance in pleading attitudes, and look as though they implored a bit of paint to prevent the inscriptions beneath from being lost for ever. The stone in one case has lost its outer coating, and the artifice of the sculptor in tipping nose and chin with a whiter material has been disclosed, and thick coats of paint are peeling off the defaced epitaphs which set forth the merits of their originals. The inscriptions are in Latin, but the following is, we believe, a free, if not an exact, translation:—