In 1614 or 1615, the poet's first child, a daughter, was born and was appropriately named after the two Elizabeths who had touched most closely upon his life. But the days of wedded happiness—"This is my blisse, Let it run on now!"—were brief. On March 6, 1616, he died,—only thirty-one years of age.[112]
The lines written to Lady Rutland, some five years before,
What little wit I have
Is not yet grown so near unto the grave,
But that I can, by that dim fading light,
Perceive of what, or unto whom I write,
may have been conceived merely in humorous self-depreciation. But when we couple them with the epitaph written by John of Grace-Dieu "upon my deare brother, Francis Beaumont,"—
On Death, thy murd'rer, this revenge I take:
I slight his terrour, and just question make,
Which of us two the best precedence have—
Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave.
Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death to blame
Miscounted yeeres, and measur'd age by fame:
So dearely hast thou bought thy precious lines;
Their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines.
Thy Muse, the hearer's queene, the reader's love,
All eares, all hearts (but Death's), could please and move;—
when we couple the dramatist's own words of his "wit not yet grown so near unto the grave" with these of his brother which I have italicized, and reflect that for the last three years Francis seems to have written almost nothing, we are moved to conjecture that his early death was not unconnected with an excessive devotion to his art, and that his health had been for some time failing. As Darley long ago pointed out,[113] the lines of Bishop Corbet "on Mr. Francis Beaumont (then newly dead)" may intend more than a poetical conceit; and they would confirm the probability suggested above.
He that hath such acuteness and such wit,
As would ask ten good heads to husband it;
He that can write so well, that no man dare
Refuse it for the best, let him beware:
Beaumont is dead; by whose sole death appears,
Wit's a disease consumes men in few years.—
And this conjecture is borne out by the portrait of the weary Beaumont that now hangs in Nuneham.
Three days after his death the dramatist was buried in that part of Westminster Abbey which, since Spenser was laid there to the left of Chaucer's empty grave, had come to be regarded as the Poets' Corner. Beaumont lies to the right of Chaucer's gray marble on the east side of the South Transept in front of St. Benedict's chapel. In what honour he was held we gather from the consideration that, of poets, only Chaucer and Spenser had preceded him to a resting place in the Abbey; and that of his contemporaries, only four writers of verse followed him: his brother, Sir John, who died some eleven years later, and lies beside him; his old friend, Michael Drayton, in 1631; Hugh Holland, in 1633; and that friend of all four, Ben Jonson, in 1637. On the "learned" or "historical" side of the transept, across the way from the poets, lie also only three of Beaumont's generation: Casaubon the philologist, Hakluyt the voyager, and Ben Jonson's master and benefactor—"most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in acts, all that I know,"—Camden the antiquary. "In the poetical quarter," writes Addison, a hundred years later, "I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets." Of the former category is Beaumont; of the latter, the alabaster bust of Drayton whose body lies under the north wall of the nave, and the monument to Jonson, who, having no one rich enough to "lay out funeral charges upon him," stands, in accordance with his own desire, on his "eighteen inches of square ground" under a paving-stone in the north aisle of the nave,—and the figure of their associate, Shakespeare, who, though there was much talk of transporting his body from Stratford in the year of his death and Beaumont's, did not, even in "preposterous" effigy, join his compeers of the Poets' Corner till more than a century had elapsed. Upon Beaumont's grave Dryden's lofty pile encroaches. Above the grave rises the bust of Longfellow; and not far from Beaumont, Tennyson and Browning were lately laid to rest.