Former Director of the British Museum Sir David M. Wilson has written a book not quite consonant with its title, "Awful Ends." Many of his chosen epitaphs are poignant rather than humorous or caustic. For instance, the verse from Catherine Dyer in memory of her husband that begins:

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day/ Afford thy drowszy patience leave to stay / One hower longer: so that we might either / Sate up, or gone to bedd together?

As an archeologist, Sir David was professionally involved with funerary inscriptions for over forty years. He shares the good, the bad, and the banal in "Awful Ends" - English epitaphs for the most part, a few written to memorialize people not quite dead. This is the Earl of Rochester's impromptu verse on Charles II that was NOT inscribed on his sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey:

Here lies our mutton-eating king, / Whose word no man relies on; / Who never said a foolish thing, / Nor ever did a wise one.

For those of us who will probably not be entombed in the somber splendour of Westminster Abbey, we can be comforted by:

Here lie I at the Chancel door / Here lie I because I'm poor / The further in the more you'll pay / Here lie I as warm as they.

Cold comfort, perhaps. Epitaph hunters should enjoy this gently ironic ramble through mossy English lych-yards. For those of us who are contemplating our own demise, it might wise to choose our memorial verse in advance. Otherwise we could end up with:

Sacred to the memory of / Captain Anthony Wedgwood / Accidentally shot by His Gamekeeper / Whilst out shooting. / "Well done thou good and faithful servant."...