ABSTRACT
These lines are engraved on a tombstone in the burial-ground of St Mary's Church, Bamsley, from which our text is taken. Not pub!. by B.; first pub!. (with an erroneous reading, 'Sanctuary-papers' for 'Sanctuary-tapers', I. II) by E. G. Hayford inN & Q cxciii (1948) 248-9. A version, six lines shorter than the text of the epitaph and differing significantly in other respects, was pub!. by F. G. Kenyon in Comhil/ xxxvi (Feb. 1914), taken from a manuscript in the hand of B.'s sister Sarianna, and then repr. New Poems, under the speculative tide Lines in Memory of his Parents (r866). Neither tide nor date are in Sarianna's MS (SAB); the date is that of the death of B.'s father, his mother having died in 1849. Kenyon evidently knew nothing about the epitaph. The provenance of SAB is not known. It is now in the University of Toronto Library, on the same page as Sarianna's transcript of A Forest Thought (see p. 342 below). This implies that it was made from B.'s holograph, but whether this holograph derived from the epitaph text or constituted a separate draft cannot be definitely ascertained. We would argue however that SAB represents an earlier draft, both because it is shorter (see below, Macready's anecdote) and because it is in the first person, while the epitaph text is in the second person plural: the placing of the tombstone on which the epitapheappears is attrib. to 'the surviving Children' of James Dow, William Alexander and his sister Margaret, and it is possible that B. originally drafted the poem believing it to be William's tribute only, and revised it when he knew that it was to be ascribed to both brother and sister.
