The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1902-07-27
TAILORS' EPITAPHS,
Curious Collection in the English
Organ of the Craft.

Curious Collection In the English
Organ of the Craft.
Among the various places of interest
to be found in different parts of the
country, the old churchyard is GER
tainly not the least interesting, as the
tombstones occasionally contain rec
ords of those who are buried below in
quaint, if not humorous, language, the
reading of which affords pleasure, as
well as food for thought. Some of
those referring to tailors show an ac-
Quaintance with the trade which would
serve to suggest that they have been
written by some of the dead mems
comrades. One epitaph to be seen in a
Lincolnshire graveyard was composed
by the man prior to his decease. At
ter giving his name and the date of
his death, it says:
1t takes nine tailors to make a man,
The fool goes shouting as loud as he
can;
And yet, in a sense, he hath not blum
dered;
To make a man of such stuff as he
A miracle of clothes would be,
Needing of tailors' brains an hundred.
In the same churchyard there is a
moss-covered slab of crumbling slate
which has the following inscription,
now almost unreadable 1t says:
Read, mortal, the lot of a tailor. John
Roe;
He outlived all his wives, who were
seven;
The worn clothes of his soul lie
crumbling below,
81
In a Derbyshire churchyard the fol-
lowing is carved on the tombstone of
James Green, who was evidently a
tailor by trade, and a man of broad
and generous spirit. The epitaph runs
as follows:
While he lived he all carefully covered
our skins,
And but left the right parts to be
seen:
So tell of his virtues and hide all his
sins:
AS he did, do you to James Green.
A few yards from the grave of James
Green two tailors are buried, the date
on the stones being 1712. One of them
reads:
He made others ever new,
Yet for himself could not it do:
Threadbare at last, he's laid away,
Against the resurrection day.
The second tombstone is hard to read.
and requires very close inspection to
be able to decipher the following lines;
Your tears for a tailor who died in a
fit,
And still. If the truth must be
known,
He never succeeded with all his wit
In other than this fit alone.
The man who wrote the epitaph must
surely have had a grudge against this
poor fellow, and though he may not
have been very successful cutter, yet
doubtless he succeeded occasionally.
Another epitaph on a tailor reads as
follows:
Low lies the man who. faithful, up
ward rose.
BY making for our noble King his
clothes.
His work gave his great patron such
delight,
The King was moved to make of him
Knight.
In a graveyard near Nottingham
there are three taliors buried, and, ac-
cording to a local tradition we read,
their epitaphs were written by fam
tied the town and employed these tall
ors to make his clothes and at the
time of their deaths owed them a con-
siderable sum, and this was his method
of paying off the amount:
These bones are a tailors. who never
did fail
In making good garments or In drink
ing good ale.
So we'll he did both that till now none
hath guessed
In which of two callings he shone at
his best.
The second stone has as follows:
a man of stitches was Ross Hyde,
In his work lay all his pride;
And even when this tailor died
'T,was with a stitch in his right side.
The third one is worthy of the two
preceding and is plainly the work of
the same mind
Here lies a tailor so careful and proud,
That in his last illness he sewed his
own shroud.
81 shall soon lie in 1t, were the last
words he said
Death came as he finished and cut of
his thread.
An interesting epitaph on a tailor is
% he found in Nathan Parish Church,
and refers 70 the difficulty tailors have
IN getting their bills paid II runs as
follows;
All We who pay not what ye owe