Inscription

“ The inscription, which I now proceed to consider, wants no arguments to prove its antiquity to those among the learned, who are versed in the writers of the darker ages, and know that the Latin poetry of those times was of a peculiar cast and air, not easy to be understood, and very difficult to be imitated; nor can it be conceived, that any man would lay out his abilities on a way of writing, which, though attained with much study, could gain him no reputation; and engrave his chimeras on a stone, to astonish posterity. ”

“ INSCRIPTION, n. Something written on another thing. Inscriptions are of many kinds, but mostly memorial, intended to commemorate the fame of some illustrious person and hand down to distant ages the record of his services and virtues. To this class of inscriptions belongs the name of John Smith, penciled on the Washington monument. ”

“ A Hebrew student will find the inscription very like historical narrative in the Old Testament.
(c) The historian finds in the Inscription a valuable contribution to the little-known story of a people long extinct. ”

“ But you find a resemblance in the inscriptions as well. Thus, wherever the Methodists obtained a firm hold on the community, you find the spirit of ugliness appearing in the village churchyard from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, when the old ornate and beautiful stones with figures of winged cherubs bearing torches, scattering flowers or blowing trumpets, were the usual decorations, giving place to the plain or ugly stone with its square ugly lettering and the dull monotonous form of the inscription. ”

“ A lovelier walk, or a lovelier scenery could not well be imagined. The inscriptions carved in such a place cannot fail to produce a grand effect on the mind. They are carved at such regular intervals that no sooner has one completed his thoughts on one inscription, another meets one's gaze. ”

“ If only they had really blotched up their foreheads with those inscriptions, it would be some satisfaction to us, at least; but as it is, we are being imposed upon by an actor’s tricks, and hoaxed by a fake inscription! ”

“ The following inscription was lately discovered when digging in the church of St Hilary, in the island of Jersey. If we except one barbarism, and one strong license, the epitaph may bear a comparison with most of the inscriptions in the Latin Anthology. ”

“ It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every one will know it is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember—draw from the copy only once; make your other twelve and the inscription from memory.
Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its inscription once from my sample and two or three times from memory the details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you like, you may make merely the whale’s head and water-spout for the Conqueror till you end his reign, each time saying the inscription in place of writing it ”

“ Setting-out.—An inscription of any size, or one requiring complex or very nice arrangement, is set-out in faint, sketchy outline of lead pencil or chalk. Simple writing is not set-out, but such slight calculation or planning as is necessary is carried out mentally, or on a scrap of paper. By practice the scribe, like the compositor, can fit his lettering to the given space with ease and accuracy. ”

“ I was happily free, which probably was the cause of my being able to decipher the true meaning of the Altar inscription. To criticise the translation of a gentleman admitted (though reluctantly) to be a scholar, requires scholarship in my critic, who however he may be qualified to act as a pioneer, to wield the mattock and the spade for Archæological researches, should be cautious of wielding his pen, until he can show better credentials for the office he assumes, than rank nonsense attempted to be clothed in Dog-Latin. ”

“ In 1909, when the inscription was written, its author was a relatively unimportant man—to-day he is known throughout the world and is in a position to influence its destinies as no other man has ever been. ”

“ Emigravit is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies. ”

“ They are covered with inscriptions printed in cuneiform characters, and contain records of sales of slaves, loans of money, sales of land and the like, and on the larger bricks and cylinders are longer inscriptions of greater interest, among them stories of the Flood. Many of these records are contained within an outer shell of the same shape, in which is either a short title with seal or even a duplicate inscription. These outer cases are the earliest examples of anything in the [86] shape of a cover or binding over written or printed matter. ”

“ History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand, and their epitaphs but characters written in the dust? ”

“ The English School of Binding brings before us a roll of names borne by artists of successive periods and of varying merit, from the last quarter of the fifteenth century to the present time. That it is by no means exhaustive is due to the circumstance that in the case of many of the older, and some of the more recent, masters, there is no clue to the origin in the shape of an external inscription on the cover, as we find on foreign works, or in that of a ticket or a signature. ”

“ It is never wise to jumble a number of different styles of lettering together in one inscription, as is sometimes done. The practice of this kind of thing tends to make the lettering less readable, besides making it look somewhat freakish. ”

“ Therefore this hieroglyphic inscription begins with the personal pronoun
or I. That is very easy, of course.
"Now, the most ancient of Egyptian inscriptions read vertically in columns; there are only two columns in this papyrus, so we'll try it vertically and pass downward to the next symbol, which is inclosed in a sort of frame or cartouch. That immediately signifies that royalty is mentioned; therefore, we have already translated as much as 'I, the king (or queen) .' Do you see?"
"Yes," said Burke, staring. ”

“ They say the test of this is whether a man can write an inscription. ”

“ The inscriptional records of India which have thus come down to us do not, as far as they are known at present, pretend to the antiquity of the Greek inscriptions of the Hellenic world; much less to that of the inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria. But they are no less Reasons why the inscriptions are so valuable. important; since we are dependent on them for almost all our knowledge of the ancient history of the country. ”

“ The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood. ”

“ It was hinted, by another, that an inscription, which had no relation to any particular set of men amongst us, but was composed many ages before the parties, which now divide the nation, had a being, could not be so properly conveyed to the world, by means of a paper dedicated to political debates. ”

“ An inscription upon the books of record of an instrument, without such authentication, is considered a mere unofficial entry of the register, constituting no record, and imparting no notice to purchasers or creditors. ”

“ EPIGRAPHY (Gr. ἐπί, on, and γράφειν, to write) , a term used to denote (1) the study of inscriptions collectively, and (2) the science connected with the classification and explanation of inscriptions. It is sometimes employed, too, in a more contracted sense, to denote the palaeography, in inscriptions. ”

“ But the words on the top of the cross are an example of a formula which is of constant occurrence in runic texts, and which in every known instance indicates the person who carved the monument. That in this particular case it can have been employed to denote the author of the verses which form a part of the inscription is in the highest degree unlikely. ”

“ So the servile went out and delivered the message, whereat they entered and found five lines of inscription in different parts of the hall with a candelabrum overhanging each and every and the whole five contained the sentence we have before mentioned; furthermore all the lights were hung up over the legend that the writing might be made manifest unto whoso would read it. ”

“ This volume, which in the present manuscript occupies the first sixty folios, has an erased inscription at the end, but all efforts to restore it fail to reveal any more than ‘Cest livre’ at the beginning, and a date at the end. ”

“ The superiority of the inks known to the ancients has long been the object of surprise and admiration. The inscriptions on mummy-cases, made at a time long antedating the Christian Era, and the writing on manuscripts made in the early centuries of Christian history, in addition to the beauty of the form and finish of the writing, have a freshness of appearance as though they were only of years' instead of centuries' duration. ”

“ The space available for a given inscription may in this way largely determine the arrangement of the lettering, comparatively small and large spaces suggesting respectively “Massed Writing” and “Fine Writing” (see p. 262) .
Fig. 155.
In certain decorative inscriptions, where letters are merely treated as decorative forms—readableness [p267] being a matter of little or no moment—the treatment of the spacing is adapted to a particular surface; and, for example:—
Fig. ”

“ The date of inscriptions is determined partly by the internal evidence of the subject, persons, and events treated of, and the character of the dialect and language. But the most important evidence is the form of the letters and style of execution. For the Attic inscriptions the development Date of Inscriptions. from the earliest times to about A.D. 500 is elaborately treated by Larfeld, Handbuch der att. Inschr. (1902) . bk. ii. Much of the evidence is of a kind difficult to appreciate from a mere description. ”

“ Within the same inscription the appearance of the letter often varies considerably as regards the space between and the length of the uprights. When only one bar is found it regularly crosses the uprights about the middle. ”

“ It is highly probable that they took the form of inscriptions in temples and upon monuments, and gradually developed into historical and topographical records, preserving local memories, and giving form to local legends. ”

“ XX If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: "Nothing passes away." I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence. ”

“ The figure stood on a cloud, an inscribed label, a disc or band of earth. In the fourteenth century spots breaking the ground took very often the form of badges, fleurs-de-lys, heraldic animals, cyphers, and so on (page 156) , and even in the fifteenth it was quite common to find figures against a flat ground, broken only by inscription, either on white or yellow labels (pages 186, 339) , or leaded in bold letters of white or yellow into the background itself (page 196) . ”

“ What us there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? ”

“ It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth walls the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the rows of little figures, little owls, little jackals, that tell in a lost language the history of ancient peoples. ”

“ The inscriptions, of which the lines, as well as the lines of the effigy, are filled up with red or black mastic, are generally on the border of the slab, and merely indicate the deceased's name and title, and the year of his death, concluding with a brief pious invocation or consolatory sentiment. ”

“ My reward for having ascertained and proved those facts, was to be denied the prize, and to have my manuscript mislaid or lost or stolen! My historical researches ever since have continued to confirm nearly all these facts.1
2. Documents and monuments. The historical titles and proofs, inscriptions, [pg 046] medals, coins, charters, &c., which are so common elsewhere, are but few as yet, in America, belonging to early times: most belong to modern history. ”

“ The palæographic characters of the inscription accord with the idea that it was cut about the end of the fourth century.
8. The Latin is the only language [215] known to have been used in British inscriptions and other writings in these early times by the Romanised Britons and the foreign colonists and conquerors of the island. ”

“ And we shall presently have occasion to notice other sins, scarcely less flagrant, against every canon of chronology belonging to the subject Pg 372 which he professes to handle. But first let us say a few words as to what those canons are, and how they have been established.
It is only in our own day that the study of inscriptions generally, and especially of Christian inscriptions, has received that development which entitles it to a place among real sciences. It has now acquired a light and a solidity which constitute it one of the most trustworthy founts of ancient history. ”

“ The illiterate inscriptions on many books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too often culminating in appropriation to domestic requirements. ”

“ Should a copy of the inscriptions in this receptacle (which are numerous) be acceptable, I will endeavour to procure one; but in this case I should be glad to know whether these extracts should be confined to names, dates, and genealogical information only, or include the various tributes of affection or of friendship, by which they are generally accompanied. ”