crease to be distributed to the almes-poor there.”—The donation has all the air of a rich and sagacious usurer.
Shakespeare himself did not survive Mr. Combe long, for he died in the year 1616, the 53d of his age. He lies buried on the north side of the chancel in the great church at Stratford; where a monument, decent enough for the time, is erected to him, and placed against the wall. 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 scrowl of paper. The Latin distich, which is placed under the cushion, has been given us by Mr. Pope, or his graver, in this manner.
I confess, I do not conceive the difference betwixt ingenio and genio in the first verse. They seem to me inirely synonymous terms; nor was the Pylian sage Nestor celebrated for his ingenuity, but for an experience and judgment owing to his long age. Dugdale, in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, has copied this distich with a distinction which Mr. Rowe has followed, and which certainly restores us the true meaning of the epitaph.
JUDICIO Pylium, genio Socratem[1], &c.
- ↑ The first syllable in Socratem is here made short, which cannot be allowed. Perhaps we should read Sophoclem. Shakespeare is then appositely compared with a dramatic author among the ancients: but still it should be remembered that the elogium is lessen’d while the metre is reform’d; and it is well known that some of our early writers of Latin poetry were uncommonly negligent in their prosody, especially in proper names. The thought of this distich, as Mr. Tollet observes, might have been taken from the Faëry Queene of Spenser, b. ii. c. 9. ft. 48, and c. 10. ft. 3.
To this Latin inscription on Shakespeare should be the lines which are found underneath it on his monument.
Stay, passenger, why dost thou go so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plac’d
Within this monument; Shakespeare, with whom
Quick nature dy’d, whose name doth deck the tomb
Far more than cost; since all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.
