with open violence by those who have pretensions to respectability, education, wealth, and influence beyond their fellow men. We contemplate the devastation arising from the various causes to which I have adverted, with a holy jealousy, that these sacred memorials have not been the subject of legislative interference; and committed to the care of those whose sacred offices would well adapt them to be the custodes of such a source of evidence, by means of some effective mode of registration; such evidence being alike useful to the community at large, and of serious importance to the descendants of those persons to whose memory such monuments had been erected.
Yarmouth church has not been an exception to the numerous instances of outrage so often observable as regards monumental inscriptions; on the contrary, we find the melancholy truth recorded of the sepulchral brasses having been, in 1551, torn from their places, and devoted to the purpose of making weights for the town! Whatever motive incited the commission of this act of Vandalism, it surely could not have been one of economy merely; many an "orata pro anima" was, probably, sacrificed to the mania of the day; and this destruction of the most interesting of almost all monumental records may be attributed rather to fanatic zeal, than to the wretched parsimony of saving the expense of metal for the purpose to which those brasses were employed. Several stones now remain from which the brasses were removed, and have been devoted to recent inscriptions.
The earliest monumental inscription now remaining in this church is that to the memory of John Couldham in 1620, in the middle aisle of the chancel, upon a flat stone[1]; which is inscribed on the edge of the stone, so as not to be injured by the traffic of persons passing over it[2]. This plan is admirably adapted for preserving the inscription from injury; for many of the flat stones in the aisles, and passages between the pews, are so completely worn, as to cause the inscriptions to be entirely effaced. The oldest tablet remaining, is one to the memory of "Hanna Dasset, virgo" 1637[3]; but the inscription is becoming very illegible. The total number of flat stones within
