Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/43

 xii. JULY ii, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

35

buried "at night in his bed, comfortably tucked in, with pillows and coverlets, as he had died." GKISWOLD S. BURR.

Troy, N.Y.

To the instances of upright burial men- tioned by ME. HAEEY HEMS may be added that which occurs in the church (originally an ancient structure) of All Saints, Narburgh, in Norfolk, which contains some ancient monuments to the family of Spelman. En- closed in one of the pillars, so that the inscription is directly against his face, is the body, in an upright position, of Clement Spelman, Recorder of Nottingham, who died in 1679. Was it to typify the vigilance of the soldier that captains in the army were anciently buried in the upright posi- tion ? The body of the eccentric Capt. Backhouse was deposited in the coffin in an upright position within a niche or recess in the western wall of a sepulchre which was erected in his own grounds under his own superintendence, about a mile from Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire. His remains were, however, interred seven years later in the churchyard of Great Missenden. The following is quoted from Hearne's * Col- lection of Antiquarian Discourses,' vol. i. p. 212, by Mr. England Hewlett, F.S.A., in an interesting essay on ' Burial Customs ' in the Westminster Jteview, 1893, p. 169 :

" For them above the ground buryed I have by tradition heard, that when anye notable captayne dyed in battle or carape, the souldyers used to take his bodye, and to sette him on his feete uprighte, and put his launce or pike into his hand, and then his fellowe souldyers did travell, and everye man bringe so much earthe and .laye about him as should cover him, and mount up to cover the top of his pike."

Thomas Cooke, who was a Governor of the Bank of England from 1737 to 1739, and who had formerly been a merchant residing in Constantinople, died at Stoke Newington, 12 Aug., 1752, and by his directions his body was carried to Morden College, Blackheath, of which he was a trustee ; it was taken out of the coffin and buried in a winding-sheet upright in the ground, according to the Eastern custom. See Robinson's 'History and Antiquities of Stoke Newington,' ibid. J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

SHAKESPEAEE'S SEVENTY - SIXTH SONNET (9 th S. x. 125, 274, 412, 495, 517 ; xi. 96, 249, 493). When Ben Jonson said that Shake- speare wanted art he stated what every student of Shakespeare has felt to be true. The poet did lack the faculty of creating effec- tive dramatic situations ; witness the frequent use he makes of the feeble device of disguise

by

of one character by another. When Jonson expressed the wish that Shakespeare had blotted out a thousand lines, he was but uttering the wish of a scholar that Shake- speare had taken more trouble with his work, for then the result would have been nearer that perfection which appealed to the scholarly mind of Ben Jonson. ME. STRONACH terms these criticisms " severe strictures." I confess they do not appear to me to have any special severity. On the contrary, I have always been glad Ben Jonson uttered them, for they help to humanize Shakespeare, rais- ing him, on the one hand, from the dull clod the Baconians would have us believe him to have been, and, on the other, bringing him down from that position of fleshless abstrac- tion in which he is viewed by Teutonic critics. They have this merit also : they at least prove that Shakespeare was an author.

Surely it is self-evident that the word "sweat," to which ME. STEONACH attaches seeming importance, has a purely figurative meaning. The word is intended to convey the idea of intense mental effort. Compare Dickens's account of his feelings after he had written the death of Little Nell. Dickens had a ready enough pen, but 1 should say he sweated in the Jonsonian sense over that portion of the ' Old Curiosity Shop.'

As for Leonard Digges, I agree with ME. STEONACH that it is no wonder the editors refused his lines admission to the Folio ; but if the lines were rejected because of their obvious untruthfulness, is not that a good reason for believing that the lines which did appear in the Folio were true 1 In the First Folio, at the head of Jonson's lines, appear these words : " To the memory of my beloved, the author, Master William Shakespeare, and what he has left us." As the Folio was pub- lished in 1623 and Bacon died in 1626, how could the last six words refer to a man who was still alive 1

It is here that the Baconian argument appears so utterly weak. Here is one of the strongest bits of evidence against the whole Baconian theory, and yet we are asked to believe, without any evidence adduced, that when Jonson wrote the word " Shakespeare " he really meant " Bacon," or (to use a plain, ugly, but exact word) to believe that Jonson was simply a liar. Really, if we are to adopt this method of argument, it will be quite possible to prove anything about anybody.

And this brings me once more to ME. CEAWFOED'S articles. ME. CEAWFOED says Jonson copied from Bacon. Well, not being a Baconian, he could scarcely say anything