Shakspeare's second daughter, Judith, had married a vintner, and received a much smaller share of her father's inheritance than her sister, Mrs. Hall. Was it in her quality of eldest daughter, or in consequence of some special predilection, that Shakspeare thus distinguished Susannah? An epitaph engraved upon her tomb, at her death in 1649, represents her as "witty above her sex," in which she had "something of Shakspeare," hut more because she was "wise to salvation," and "wept for all." About Judith we know nothing, except that she could not write; which fact is established by a deed still existing, to which she has affixed a cross, or some analogous sign, indicated by a marginal note as "Judith Shakspeare, her mark." Judith left three sons, who died childless. Susannah had one daughter, who married, first, Thomas Nash, and afterward Sir John Barnard, of Abington. No child was born of either of these marriages, and thus Shakspeare's posterity became extinct in the second generation.
It is somewhat remarkable that Shakspeare died on the same day as his great contemporary, Cervantes.
Shakspeare was buried in Stratford church, in which his tomb still exists. It represents the poet of the size of life, sitting under an arch, with a cushion before him, and a pen in his right hand. Like many other monuments of the time, the figure was originally colored after the life; the eyes being painted light brown, with hair and beard of a deeper tinge. The doublet was scarlet, and the gown black. The colors having become faded by time, were restored, in 1748, by Mr. John Ward, the grandfather of Mrs. Siddons and of Kemble, out of the profits of a performance of "Othello." But in 1793, Mr. Malone, one of the principal commentators upon Shakspeare, covered the statue with a thick coat of white paint; being doubtless led to do this by that exclusive prejudice in favor of modern customs which has so frequently led him into error in his commentaries. An indignant traveler, in some lines written in the Album of Stratford church, has called down the malediction of the poet upon Malone,
"Whose meddling zeal his barb'rous taste displays,
And smears his tombstone, as he marred his plays."
Without giving an absolute assent to these harsh expressions of legitimate anger, we can not refrain from a smile at observing, in Mr. Malone's coat of white paint, a symbol of the spirit which dictated his commentaries, as well as a type of the general character of the eighteenth century, held in servitude by its own tastes, and incapable of comprehending any thing that did not enter into the sphere of its ordinary habits and ideas.
Although this injudicious reparation effected a great change in the physiognomy of the portrait of Shakspeare, it was not able altogether to efface that expression of gentle serenity which appears to have characterized the countenance as well as the soul of the poet. On the sepulchral stone below the monument, the following inscription is engraved:
"Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.
Bless'd be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones."
These lines are said to have been composed by Shakspeare himself, and were the cause which prevented the transference of his tomb to Westminster, as had once been intended. Some years ago, an excavation by the wall of Stratford church exposed to view the grave in which his body had been laid; and the sexton, who, in order to prevent the sacrilegious depredations of curiosity or admiration, kept guard by the opening until the vault had been repaired, having attempted to look inside the tomb, saw neither bones nor coffin, but only dust. "It seems to me," says the traveler who relates this circumstance, "that it was something to have seen the dust of Shakspeare."