Greetings, fellow dialists,
The fine dial on the parish church, North Shields, England (BSS 0242;
55N, 1.4W), can be dated to 1793. It has recently sadly deteriorated but
is currently undergoing conservation by the church authorities. For more
than twenty years I have attempted to decipher the badly eroded motto
but without success. But now with scaffolding up to the dial it has been
possible to recover a few more letters.
As a result John Pepper of Toronto, who earlier translated the Latin of
a seventeenth century tablet within the church, has revealed that the
inscription reads: "Mortalia facta peribunt", which he translates as
"Mortal deeds will perish". He writes: These words are the latter three
and a half feet of line 68 of Horace's "Epistula ad Pisones", better
known as the "Ars Poetica).
This motto is unknown to me and does not occur in Mrs. Gatty. Is anyone
familiar with it from a dial anywhere else?
Frank
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