Weston, Stephen

In Latin: Sacred to the memory of Stephen Weston, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Bishop of this Church for seventeen years, a man of probity, learned, and contant; who, born in the county of Berkshire, was educated at Eton School and at King’s College, Cambridge. Afterwards appointed assistant master in the same school, he devoted himself with the highest honour to the cultivation of youth there from his twenty-fourth to his forty-first year of age. When failing health could no longer sustain such labours, he was chosen a Fellow of the same College at Eton, and he employed an honourable and elegant leisure in pursuing every kind of learning, in discharging the duties of the College, in adorning it with various buildings, in the meantime bringing up a numerous family, and also repeatedly attending to pastoral cares. Whence, when raised to this height of the episcopal office, there at last shone forth a virtue long hidden, yet not buried. There he set distinguished examples of learning, piety, and abstinence; of a mind uncorrupted, patient, and munificent; as he cherished the Church with fatherly benevolence, governed it with the utmost equity, and by his character both shaped and adorned his own conduct and that of others. At length, while labouring hard in this course, death overtook him: here, broken by infirm old age and long sufferings from gout, yet still vigorous and active in performing his duties, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, he departed, satisfied with life.   Beside him sleeps his most loving wife, a most holy woman, Lucia Weston; who, after a most happy marriage of fifty years, her health weakened by long care and constant watchings for her ailing husband, in her sixty-eighth year, surviving him scarcely two months, gladly resigned her body to the same tomb and her soul to the mercy of Almighty God. They died — he on the sixth day before the Ides of January, she on the fourth day before the Nones of March, in the year 1741.