Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

Stratford-on-Avon (continued)-Th

he chief interest is, quite frankly, the Shakespeare monument and the graves of his family; although even were i

ey would like to tear down that monument, and I am quite sure they would desire nothing better than permission to open that grave and howk up whatever they found there. For to them Shakespeare is "the illiterate clown of Stratford"; a very disreputable person; an impostor who could neither write nor act, and yet assumed the authorship of works by the greatest

he risk and retire out of danger to Stratford-on-Avon. It is not a convincing tale; but it is printed with much elaboration; and Bacon is made to show an astonishingly intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's family and affairs. He uses very ungentlemanly, not to say unphilosophical, language, and leaves Shakespeare without a shred of character. He shows how suddenly this misbegotten rogue, this whoreson knave, this gorbellied rascal with the wagging paunch and the many loathsome diseases which have made him old before his time leaves London, where he is in the midst of his fame

ty. But Bacon was not to be outwitted. He heard early in 1616 that Shakespeare was in failing health, and sent down on that three days' journey from London to Stratford-on-Avon two of Shakespeare's friends, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, who were in the secret of the authorship. They were instructed

ie meeting, and it seems, drank too hard, for S

gets out of that, cable me, at my expense!" No doubt Ben Jonson and Drayton guessed they had got Shakespeare safe enough, but to make doubly sure (says Donnelly) they invented and had engraved the famous verse which appears on the gravestone, involving blessings upon the man who "spares these stones" and curses upon he who moves the poet's bones. The world has always thought Shakespeare himself was the author of these lines. The reason for them is found in the horror felt by Shakespeare-and reflected in Hamlet-at the disturbance of the remains of the dead. In his time it was the custom to rifle the older graves, in order to provide room for fresh burials, and then to throw the bones from them into the vaulted charnel-house beneath the chancel. This revolting irreverence, which, as a long-established custom at that time, seemed a natural enough thing to the average person, was hor

so old as they appear to be, but were recut, and the lettering greatly modified, about 1831. Not one person in ten thousand of those who come to this spot is aware of the fact, and no illustration of the original lettering exists; but George Steevens, the Shakespearean scholar, wrote of it, a

for Iesvs

Dvst Enclo

Man Yt spare

e He Yt mov

ated in the existing inscription illustrated here, in which the word "bleste" forms a prominent example. In that word the letters "s

-enemy, the emphatic F. J. Furnivall delighted, by the way, to style "Hell-P") thus

become so much decayed as to suggest a vandalic order for its removal, and in its stead to place a new slab, one which marks certainly the locality of Shakespeare's grave, and continues the record of the farewell lines, but indicates nothing more. The original m

s for the eccentric appearance of capitals where they have no business to be; for the hyphen which so oddly divides the word "Enclo-Ased"; for the full-stops in "HE.Re." or for the curious choice that writes "Iesvs" in small letters and "SAKE" in large

the Greene, Marlowe,

s, indeed; but he understates it, if we were to believe this revel