Epitaphs on Fat Folks
In the year 1755, died the great tallow-chandler whose life and death are thus laconically recorded on his tombstone:—
Here lies in earth an honest fellow,
Who died by fat, and lived by tallow.
Another corpulent person is thus lamented:—
Here lies the body of Thomas Dollman,
A vastly fat, though not a very tall man;
Full twenty stone he weighed, yet I am told,
His captain thought him worth his weight in gold:
Grim Death, who ne’er to nobody shows favour,
Hurried him off for all his good behaviour;
Regardless of his weight, he bundled him away,
’Fore any one “Jack Robinson” could say.
A moral lesson is given in the following:—
But why he grew so fat i’ th’ waist,
Now mark ye the true reason,
When other people used to fast,
He feasted in that season.
So now, alas! hath cruel Death
Laid him in his sepulchre.
Therefore, good people, here ’tis seen,
You plainly may see here,
That fat men sooner die than lean,
Witness Fat Johnny Holder.
The son of a Dean, a man of very spare habit, expressing to the son of a Bishop his astonishment at the great difference of the size of their fathers, the Bishop being very fat, he explained the reason in the following extempore parody of the old song:—
There’s a difference between
A Bishop and a Dean,
And I’ll tell you the reason why:
A Dean cannot dish up
A dinner like a Bishop,
To feed such a fat son as I.