y (for your death-bed biographer, writing under kinsfolk's tear-laden eyes, must needs be smoother-tongued than truthful), the place of the modern memoir-writer was filled in Shakespeare's day

own power, to which he deprecated pretension, was needful to those who should praise him aright. But when Shakespeare lay dead in the spring of 1616, when, as one of his admirers technically phrased it, he had withdrawn from the s

mont, three poets who had already received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey-Beaumont, the youngest of them, only five weeks before Shakespeare died. To this honoured trio Basse made appeal to "lie a thought more nigh" one another, so as to make room for the newly-dead Shakespeare within their "s

arved marble

gedian, Shakespe

a splendid echo. It resounded

rise! I will n

penser, or bi

ther to make

monument wi

till, while thy

ts to read and

1630, how Shakespeare, "sepulchred"

pomp d

such a tomb wou

peare's brow would wear its greenest hue. Shakespeare's critical friend, Ben Jonson, was but one of a numerous band who imagined the "sweet swan of Avon," "the star of poets," shining for ever as a constellation in the firmament. Such was the invariabl