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in 1580. For these reasons it may very fairly be concluded, either that this inscription is erroneous from the fault of the carver, which may seem the more probable, because the spelling is likewise very bad even for that time, or that the date was inserted sometime afterwards, when the monument was perhaps repaired. The inscription seems indeed not to be the original one which is mentioned by Dr. Fuller and others to have been in Latin. In a small Latin treatise describing the monuments of Westminster in the year 1600, published, as is supposed, by Mr. Camden, we find the following account of it:

Edmundus Spenser, Londinensis, Anglicorum poetarum nostri seculi facilè princeps, quod ejus poemata, faventibus Musis et victuro Genio conscripta, comprobant. Obiit immaturâ morte, anno salutis 1598, et prope Galfredum Chaucerum conditur, qui felicissime poesim Anglicis litteris primus illustravit. In quem hæc scripta sunt epitaphia:

~ Hic prope Chaucerum situs est Spenserius, illi

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Proximus ingenio, proximus ut tumulo.

Hic prope Chaucerum, Spensere Poeta, Poetam.
Conderis, et versu quàm tumulo propior :
Anglica, te vivo, vixit plausitque Poesis;

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Nunc moritura timet, te moriente, mori.

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The absurdity of supposing Spenser born in 1510 appears plainly from the expression immaturâ morte, which could not with any propriety be applied to a man who had died at the age of eighty eight.

... Beside those works of Spenser which have been

preserved, it is ascertained that he had written several others, of which the titles only can now be traced. Among these were nine Comedies, in imitation of the comedies of his admired Ariosto, inscribed with the names of the nine Muses. The rest, which are mentioned in his Letters, and those of his friends, are his Dying Pelicane, his Pageants, Stemmata Dudleyana, the Canticles Paraphrased, Ecclesiastes, Seven Psalms, Hours of our Lord, Sacrifice of a Sinner, Purgatory, A Se'nnight's Slumber, The Court of Cupid, and The Hill of Lovers. It is likewise said, he had written a treatise in prose, called The English Poet. As for the Epithalamion Thamesis, and his Dreams, both mentioned by himself in one of his letters, they seem to be still preserved, though under different names. It appears, from what is said of the Dreams by his friend Mr. Harvey, that they were an imitation of Petrarch's Visions; and it is therefore probable that they are the same which were afterwards published under the several titles of Visions of the World's Vanity, Bellay's Visions, Petrarch's Visions, &c. And though by one of his letters we find he had formed the plan of a poem called the Epithalamion Thamesis, and intended, after a fashion then newly introduced, to write it in English hexameters, yet whoever observes the account he gives of it there, and compares it with canto XI of book IV of the Fairy Queen, will see reason to believe that he suspended his first thought, and wrought it afterwards into that beautiful episode of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, which is so great an

ornament to that book. This will appear yet the more probable, if it be considered that, with all its beauty, that episode is no essential part of the poem, but is rather an excrescence, or a digression from it.

Hardly any account can be found of the family which Spenser left behind him; all we know is that in the few particulars of his life prefixed to the last folio edition of his works, it is said that his great grandson, Hugolin Spenser, after the return of Charles II, was restored by the Court of Claims to so much of the lands as could be ascertained to have been his ancestor's. Whether this be true or not can hardly be determined; but there is another circumstance of which we have much better assurance-that a person came over from Ireland in the reign of King William to solicit the same affair, and brought with him letters of recommendation as a descendant of Spenser. His name procured him a favourable reception; and he applied particularly to Mr. Congreve, by whom he was generously recommended to the favour of the late Earl of Halifax, who was then at the head of the Treasury, and thus obtained his suit. This man was somewhat advanced in years, and might have been the same mentioned before, who had possibly recovered only some part of the estate at first, or had been disturbed in the possession of it. He could give no account of the works of his ancestor which are wanting, and which are therefore, in all probability, irrecoverably lost.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was the son of John Shakespeare, and was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, in April 1564. His family, as appears by the register and public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as Gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment. He had bred him, it is true, for some time at a free school, where, it is probable, he acquired what Latin he was master of; but the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home, forced his father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily prevented his further proficiency in that language. It is without controversy, that in his works we scarce find any traces of any thing that looks like an imitation of the ancients. The delicacy of his taste, and the natural bent of his own great genius (equal, if not superior, to some of the best of theirs ), would certainly have led him to read and study them with so much pleasure, that some of their fine images would naturally have insinuated themselves into, and been mixed with his own writings; so that his not copying at least something from them. may be an argument of his never having read them. Whether his ignorance of the ancients was a disadvantage to him or not, may admit of a dispute:

for though the knowledge of them might have made him more correct, yet it is not improbable but that the regularity and deference for them, which would have attended that correctness, might have restrained some of that fire, impetuosity, and even beautiful extravagance, which we admire in Shakespeare: and I believe we are better pleased with those thoughts, altogether new and uncommon, which his own imagination supplied him so abundantly with, than if he had given us the most beautiful passages out of the Greek and Latin poets, and that in the most agreeable manner that it was possible for a master of the English language to deliver them.

Upon his leaving school, he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him; and, in order to settle in the world after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young. His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford. In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance, that he was guilty of, forced him both out of his country, and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seems at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry. He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into bad company, and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice

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