Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/91

 POET'S CORNER IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

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��"Thon art a monument without a tomb And art alive still, while thy book shall live, And we have wits to read and praise to give."

Drayton was next honored by a burial in Poet's Corner. He was renowned in bis days for a poem called "Polyolbion," which was then regarded as a divine work. Not a century elapsed before he was forgotten. When Goldsmith read his name, he exclaimed: "Drayton! I never heard of him before." The lines on his monument, ascribed to both Jon- son and Quarles, show how his contem- poraries esteemed him :

"Ruin shall disclaim To be the treasurer of thy fame, His name that can not fade, shall be An everlasting monument to thee."

Ben Jonson soon followed the man he so generously eulogized. Before his death he asked King Charles I, for "eight- een inches of square ground in Westmin- ster Abbey." He is thought to have been buried in a standing posture, and this request is adduced to prove his pur- pose. The inscription — "O, rare Ben Jonson" is said to have been cut for eighteen pence, at the charge of a friend of the poet named Jack Young. As late as 1849, when the grave of Sir Robert Wil- son was opened near the monument of Jonson, the superintendent of the work affirmed that the loose sand of Jonson's grave, rippled in like a quicksand; and that the bones of the legs were standing upright and the head with some red hair upon it, fell down from above to the bot- tom of the new grave.

Several other poets, some of them dis- tinguished in their day, others having no claim to the immortal honor conferred upon them by their tombs, followed Jonson and preceded Dryden. Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, reared his monu- ment. Many inscriptions were prepared, but a very simple one was finally adopt- ed. Pope suggested this :

"This Sheffield raised: the sacred dust below Was Dryden's once— the rest who does not know ?"

John Phillips, an ordinary poet, was

buried in Poet's Corner in 1708. He was

an admirer of Milton, and the patron who

composed his epitaph, pronounced him

second only to Milton :

��"Uni Miltono secundus, primoque poene par."

Bishop Sprat, then Dean of Westmin- ster,had the offensive allusion erased, be-, cause he would not allow the name of the regicide Milton to be engraved on the walls of Westminster Abbey. Bishop Atterbury, his successor, though a Tory, four years later, restored the line. After the lapse of four more years, the criti- cisms of Addison, in the Spectator, made Milton so dear to the English people, that his bust was set up in the abbey. How fickle is public opinion. One day, hosan- nas rend the air. another, the cry of "Away with him." In the case of the blind old bard, the order was reversed and the insult came first in time. Addi- son sleeps near his beloved Milton's bust. His monument was not erected till 1808. Pope choose to be interred in Twicken- ham. He resembled nobody else in body, mind or estate. He was always unique in all that he said or wrote or did. Of the proposal to lay his body in West- minster Abbey, he wrote :

"Heroes and kings your distance keep, In peace, let one poor poet sleep, Who never nattered folks like you : Let Horace blush and Virgil too."

He took more pleasure in this repulse of the proffered honor than others en- joyed in the anticipation of it. When old Sam Johnson, a few days before his de- cease, was asked where he would choose to be buried, he replied with conscious dignity : "Doubtless, in Westminster Ab- bey."

The three greatest geniuses of the gen- eration that preceded ours, Burns, Scott and Byron were buried in other places. The last named poet was excluded by the guardians of the abbey, and public opinion sustained their verdict. The same English people are now rearing a public monument to his memory. His vices are already forgotten and his sur- passing genius alone remembered. Envy is sometimes extinguished by death and time. "Extinctus amabitur."

A long list of men of letters lengthens the catalogue of those buried in Poet's Corner. Macaulay, Thackeray and Dick- ens close the records of the men ennobled by genius.

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