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prepared during their lifetime and under their own directions. In these cases, even the inscriptions were written and engraved, blanks being left for the actual dates. The blanks generally remain, since too often none were found who cared to fill them up. In other instances, a brass may have been laid down to commemorate a person then long deceased; or an early brass may have been appropriated afresh at a subsequent period, and, with a fresh inscription, laid down as the portraiture and memorial of some person of a more modern age. (And here, in a parenthesis, I would observe, that not the least remarkable circumstance brought to light by the study of the monumental memorials of the middle ages, is the readiness with which the very men who were most anxious to provide monuments for themselves treated the monuments of others with disrespect, and even removed or appropriated them to their own purposes.) On the death of either a husband or wife, the survivor, in placing a brass to the memory of the lost one, usually had the figures of both represented, and the inscription written in the plural number, blanks being left for the date of the survivor's decease. In these brasses, if two dates appear, the brass itself is almost always of the earlier date. I say almost always, because in rare instances the brass to both husband and wife, with figures of both sexes, was laid down at the decease of the survivor. While speaking of the brasses to husband and wife, I may add that such effigies are occasionally to be seen hand in hand, and that, when in this attitude, they generally, if not always, denote a memorial placed by a widow to her departed lord. Of brasses of this kind, I may mention examples at Berkhampstead, A.D. 1356; Chrishall, 1370; Southacre, 1384; Dartmouth, 1403 (where Sir J. Hanley