In St. Bartholomew-the-Great, London's oldest church, is a wall tablet recording the death in 1652 of one Edward Cooke. His epitaph asks you to cry for him, "or if ye find noe vent for tears, yet stay and see the marble weepe." This is no poetic flight of fancy, for the memorial is made of "weeping marble," so called because of its tendency to break out into "tears" of moisture.
