He had made enemies of them all; but he won
his wife, and, casting her in the scale, father, mother, and friends
were as gossamer. She died two years after the wedding--to the very
day. Rich in her love, he had never taken a thought to propitiate
anybody, nor to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, and
when she suddenly departed, he turned round and found himself alone.
So far from knocking at men's doors, he more fiercely hated those who
now, touched with pity, would gladly have welcomed him. He broke
from them all, lived his own life, was reputed to be a freethinker,
and when he came to his estate, a long while afterwards, he put up
the obelisk, and recorded in Latin how Death, the foul adulterer, had
ravished his sweet bride--the coward Death whom no man could
challenge--and that the inconsolable bridegroom had erected this
monument in memory of her matchless virtues. That was all: no
blessed resurrection nor trust in the Saviour. The Reverend John
Broad, minister of Tanner's Lane Chapel, when he brought visitors
here regularly translated the epitaph. He was not very good at
Latin, but he had somehow found out its meaning.
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