Authority Cited: Epitaph on Vanbrugh [Evans, Abel]
Author name and dates: Abel Evans (1679–1737)
The "heavy load" of Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace
BKG Bio-tweet: St. John's Coll. Oxford degrees; cleric; satiric poet; best known as epigramist
Categories (list of works cited – preliminary) [BKG Note: One Epitaph on Vanbrugh cite in 1755 Dict.]
Mist's Weekly Journal: "'Tis said of some Architects, that they build light and clean; and of others that they build heavy and clumsy, the following Epitaph seems to have some reference to that observation.
EPITAPH
Reader, beneath this stone, survey
Sir J___ V_____gh's house of clay.
Earth, lye heavy on him, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."
The epitaph is attributed to Evans in: A select collection of poems: with notes, biographical and historical, the Third Volume, 1780, London: printed by and for J. Nichols, Red Lion Passage, Fleet-Street (p.161, On Sir John Vanbrugh. An Epigrammatical Epitaph); The Epitaph in 1780 uses the Dict. phrasing, see image below. See also: Vanbrugh. The Epitaph appears to be an inversion of the sentiment in Epitaph 7.461, Meleager, in the Greek Anthology, translated in Yale Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6, Poems, p.319, as "Hail Earth, Mother of all! Aesigenes was never a burden to thee, and do thou hold him without weighing heavy on him." (Thanks to R.D. Brown for pointing out that the translation is actually not by the Yale editors but borrowed from W. R. Paton in the Loeb edition, and that the relation to the Greek Anthology was noted by Richard Jodrell in Illustrations of Euripides on the Alcestis (1789), 177.)]
Author name and dates: Abel Evans (1679–1737)
The "heavy load" of Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace
BKG Bio-tweet: St. John's Coll. Oxford degrees; cleric; satiric poet; best known as epigramist
Categories (list of works cited – preliminary) [BKG Note: One Epitaph on Vanbrugh cite in 1755 Dict.]
- Epitaph on Vanbrugh; lie [BKG Note: With assistance from Prof. Beth Young, U. of Central Florida, SJ's pre-1755 possible source has now (2025) been identified: Mist's Weekly Journal, Saturday, February 24, 1727. (Vanbrugh died in March 2026, so an earlier printed source may exist.) Not attributed to Evans, but uses the Dict. wording, except SJ improves the phrase by shifting "earth." Likely from memory (when SJ was 17, he was working in his father's bookshop in Lichfield, so he would have seen the weekly newspapers). See image below.
Mist's Weekly Journal: "'Tis said of some Architects, that they build light and clean; and of others that they build heavy and clumsy, the following Epitaph seems to have some reference to that observation.
EPITAPH
Reader, beneath this stone, survey
Sir J___ V_____gh's house of clay.
Earth, lye heavy on him, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."
The epitaph is attributed to Evans in: A select collection of poems: with notes, biographical and historical, the Third Volume, 1780, London: printed by and for J. Nichols, Red Lion Passage, Fleet-Street (p.161, On Sir John Vanbrugh. An Epigrammatical Epitaph); The Epitaph in 1780 uses the Dict. phrasing, see image below. See also: Vanbrugh. The Epitaph appears to be an inversion of the sentiment in Epitaph 7.461, Meleager, in the Greek Anthology, translated in Yale Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6, Poems, p.319, as "Hail Earth, Mother of all! Aesigenes was never a burden to thee, and do thou hold him without weighing heavy on him." (Thanks to R.D. Brown for pointing out that the translation is actually not by the Yale editors but borrowed from W. R. Paton in the Loeb edition, and that the relation to the Greek Anthology was noted by Richard Jodrell in Illustrations of Euripides on the Alcestis (1789), 177.)]
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BKG Note: "On Blenheim House" appears in the 1776 Additions to Pope's Works (under a different title) but the "Epitaph" does not.