Grampian Club > Monuments and monumental inscriptions in Scotland > Volume 1

PARISH OF KILMARNOCK. 387
in 1806 he took precedency of the Prince of Wales, hut waived
the privilege when the procession entered St. Paul's. Sir James
Shaw's monument w^as inaugurated on the 4th August, 1848. The
statue is of Carrara marble, and was sculptured by Fillans.
In the parish churchyard is interred Thomas Samson, an early
friend of the poet Burns, and on whom he composed " Tam Samson's
Elegy." Samson was a prosperous seedsman, and an estimable,
kind-hearted man. On his tombstone — a plain slab, set in the
west end of the church —is the following : —
"Thomas Samson, died the 12th December, 1795, aged seventy-
two years.
Tam Samson's weel-worn clay here lies,
Ye canting zealots, spare him ;
If honest worth in heaven arise,
Ye'U mend, or ye win near him. — Burns."
James Wilson, merchant, who died in August, 1825, while in
the act of praise at family worship, has his tombstone thu3
inscribed : —
" The strain which mortal tongue began
Was finished on an angel's lyre ;
The body dropped a lifeless corpse,
The spirit sought the heavenly choir."
On the tombstone of his son, a boy of eight years, who was killed
by a cart passing over him in January, 1809, Eobert Webster has
presented the representation of a wheel, with these rhymes : —
" Ye little children that survey
The emblem'd wheel that crush'd me down,
Be cautious as you careless play,
For shafts of death fly thick around.
Still rapid drives the car of time.
Whose wheel one day shall crush you all ;
The cold, low bed that now is mine
Will soon be that of great and small."