doubts concerning the salvation of one of his fellow creatures. The foregoing more accurate statement entirely vindicates our poet from this imputation. These extemporary verses having, I suppose, not been set down in writing by their author, and being inaccurately transmitted to London, appear in an entirely different shape in Braithwaite's Remaines, and there we find them affixed to a tomb erected by Mr. Combe in his life-time. I have already shown that no such tomb was erected by Mr. Combe, and therefore Braithwaite's story is as little to be credited as Mr. Rowe's. That such various representations should be made of verses of which the author probably never gave a written copy, and perhaps never thought of after hehad uttered them, is not at all extraordinary. Who has not, in his own experience, met with similar variations in the accounts of a transaction which passed but a few months before he had occasion to examine minutely and accurately into the real state of the fact? In further support of Mr. Aubrey's exhibition of these verses, it may be observed, that in his copy the first couplet is original; in Mr. Rowe's exhibition of them it is borrowed from preceding epitaphs. In the fourth line, Ho (not Он ho, as Mr. Rowe has it,) was in Shakspeare's age the appropriate exclamation of Robin Goodfellow, alias Pucke, alias Hobgoblin ❝. It has been already mentioned p. 118, that Shakspeare's wife brought him three children: Susanna, 6 See Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, vol. iii. p. 202. who was born in May, 1583; and that about eighteen months afterwards, she was delivered of twins, a son and a daughter, who were baptized on February 2, 1584-5, by the names of Hamnet and Judith. In the year 1596, he had the irreparable misfortune to lose his only son, who died at the early age of twelve. Susanna, the eldest daughter, was married June 5, 1607, to Dr. John Hall, a respectable physician; the youngest to Mr. Thomas Quiney, February 10, 1615-16. A more particular account of our poet's family, will be found in the Stratford Registers, which are given in the Appendix. We have now the melancholy task of recording the close of Shakspeare's virtuous and brilliant career. He died on his birth-day, April 23, 1616, and had exactly completed his fifty-second year. From Du Cange's Perpetual Almanack, Gloss. in v. Annus (making allowance for the different style which then prevailed in England from that on which Du Cange's calculation was formed), it appears that the 23d of April in that year was a Tuesday. There is an interesting coincidence between the death of our great poet on his birthday, and that of one almost equally illustrious in a sister art. Raffaelle also died on his birth-day, at the still earlier age of thirty-seven. It was not only in this circumstance that they bore a resemblance to each other; but as we learn from Vasari's character of that great painter, in mildness of manners and benevolence of disposition. No account has been transmitted to us of the malady which at so early a period of life deprived England of its brightest ornament. The private note-book of his son-in-law Dr. Hall', containing a short state of the cases of his patients, was a few years ago put into my hands by my friend, the late Dr. Wright; and as Dr. Hall married our poet's daughter in the year 1607, and undoubtedly attended Shakspeare in his last illness, being then forty years old, I had hopes this book might have enabled me to gratify the publick curiosity on this subject. But unluckily the earliest case recorded by Hall, is dated in 1617. He had probably filled some other book with memorandums of his practice in preceding years; which by some contingency may hereafter be found, and inform posterity of the particular circumstances that attended the death of our great poet. Shakspeare was buried April 25, 1616, on the north side of the chancel of the great church at Stratford. On his grave-stone underneath is the following inscription, expressed, as Mr. Steevens observes, in an uncouth mixture of small and capital letters: "Good Frend for Iesus SAKE forbeare "Blese be T-E Man "And curst be He spares T-Es Stones 7 Dr. Hall's pocket-book after his death fell into the hands of a surgeon of Warwick, who published a translation of it, (with some additions of his own) under the title of Select Observations on the English Bodies of eminent Persons, in desperate Diseases, &c. The third edition was printed in 1683. 8 And curst be he that moves my bones.] It is uncertain whether this epitaph was written by Shakspeare himself, or by one of his friends after his death. The imprecation contained in this last line, was perhaps suggested by an apprehension that our author's A monument was afterwards erected to his memory, at what time is not known, but certainly remains might share the same fate with those of the rest of his countrymen, and be added to the immense pile of human bones deposited in the charnel house at Stratford. This, however, is mere conjecture; for similar execrations are found in many ancient Latin epitaphs. Mr. Steevens has justly mentioned it as a singular circumstance, that Shakspeare does not appear to have written any verses on his contemporaries, either in praise of the living, or in honour of the dead. I once imagined that he had mentioned Spenser with kindness in one of his Sonnets; but have since discovered that the Sonnet to which I allude, was written by Richard Barnefield. If, however, the following epitaphs be genuine, (and indeed the latter is much in Shakspeare's manner), he in two instances overcame that modest diffidence, which seems to have supposed the eulogium of his humble muse of no value. In a Manuscript volume of poems by William Herrick and others, in the hand-writing of the time of Charles I. which is among Rawlinson's Collections in the Bodleian Library, is the following epitaph, ascribed to our poet : AN EPITAPH. "When God was pleas'd, the world unwilling yet, "Elias James to nature payd his debt, "And here reposeth: as he liv'd, he dyde; "The saying in him strongly verefide,— "Such life, such death: then, the known truth to tell, "He liv'd a godly life, and dyde as well. "WM. SHAKSPEARE." There was formerly a family of the surname of James at Stratford. Anne, the wife of Richard James, was buried there on the same day with our poet's widow; and Margaret, the daughter of John James, died there in April, 1616. A monumental inscription "of a better leer," and said to be written by our author, is preserved in a collection of Epitaphs, at the end of the Visitation of Salop, taken by Sir William Dug before 1623, as it is mentioned in the commendatory verses of Leonard Digges. He is represented under an arch, in a sitting posture, a cushion spread before him, with a pen in his right hand, and his left rested on a scroll of paper. The following Latin distich is engraved under the cushion: Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet. In addition to this Latin inscription, the following lines are found on a tablet immediately underneath the cushion on his monument: dale in the year 1664, now remaining in the College of Arms C 35, fol. 20; a transcript of which Sir Isaac Heard, Garter Principal King at Arms, has obligingly transmitted to me. Among the monuments in Tongue church, in the county of Salop, is one erected in remembrance of Sir Thomas Stanley, Knight, who died, as I imagine, about the year 1600. In the Visitation-book it is thus described by Sir William Dugdale : "On the north side of the chancell stands a very statelie tombe, supported with Corinthian columnes. It hath two figures of men in armour, thereon lying, the one below the arches and columnes, and the other above them, and this epitaph upon it. "Thomas Stanley, Knight, second son of Edward Earle of Derby, Lord Stanley and Strange, descended from the famielie of the Stanleys, married Margaret Vernon, one of the daughters and co-heires of Sir George Vernon of Nether-Haddon, in the county of Derby, Knight, by whom he had issue two sons, Henry and Edward. Henry died an infant; Edward survived, to whom those lordships descended and married the lady Lucie Percie, second daughter of the Earle of Northumberland: by her he had issue seaven daughters. She and her foure daughters, Arabella, Marie, Alice, and Priscilla, are interred under a monument in the church of Waltham in the county of Essex. Thomas, her son, died in his infancy, and is buried in the parish : |