In the south aisle of the nave are buried two ladies whom Milton probably knew. They are the two wives of Cromwell’s secretary—Sir Samuel Morland, the inventor of the speaking trumpet and improver of the fire-engine. The inscriptions by their husband appear in Hebrew, Greek, Ethiopic, and English. In the north aisle is a curious monument of 1631 to Jane Hill. At the rear of the lady’s figure is a skeleton in a winding-sheet. Among the memorials of his contemporaries which must have peculiarly interested Milton was the little slab in the nave marked, “O rare Ben Jonson,” which slab was later removed to the Poets’ Corner. Beneath a modern paving stone, which now covers the spot, in an upright posture was placed the coffin of the poet who in his last days of poverty, in 1637, asked Charles I. for eighteen inches of square ground in Westminster Abbey. He died in a house between the Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church. Newton’s tomb near by Milton never saw, as the youth of the man of science covered only Milton’s later years. On entering the south transept, the first monument that must have claimed his interest was that of Camden, the learned antiquary. Just before going to Cambridge, in 1623, Milton may have attended the funeral of this man, whose great work, “Britannia” added new lustre to Elizabeth’s glorious reign. Camden did for England what Stow did for London, and preserved the knowledge of the nation of that day. His bust, in the rich costume of his time, presents a speaking likeness, and with his portrait in the National Gallery make the eminent scholar seem a personality as real as Raleigh’s. Ben Jonson, who was one of his pupils when he was head master of Westminster School, lovingly ascribes to him the source of his own inspiration:
“Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe
All that I am in acts, all that I know.”
Camden wrote in 1600 the first guide-book of the Abbey, which, being in Latin, would have served Milton better than it would the modern visitor. In an unmarked grave lies the body of Richard Hakluyt, the great geographer, who died in 1616.
Just beyond Camden’s tomb is that of the great scholar, Casaubon. On its front are plainly scratched the initials of the gentle angler, Izaak Walton, by himself, with the date, 1658. A few feet distant on the pavement a slab marks the grave of the “old, old, very old” man who died in 1635 at the reputed age of one hundred and fifty-two. “Old Parr,” as he was known, is said to have been born in 1483, and married his first wife at the age of eighty, and his second in 1605, when he was one hundred and twenty-two years of age. The Earl of Arundel, determined to exhibit this “piece of antiquity,” had him carried by litter from Shrewsbury and presented to Charles I. On being questioned by the king about religious matters he cautiously replied that he thought it safest to hold whatever religion was held by the reigning monarch, “for he knew that he came raw into the world, and thought it no point of wisdom to be broiled out of it,” an opinion quite to be expected of a man who had lived through the reigns of all the Tudors.
Further on, within the Poets’ Corner, two monuments especially must have been dear to the author of “Comus” and “Lycidas.” One marks the grave of Chaucer, who lies under a beautiful Gothic canopy erected in 1558, after the removal of his body to this spot; the other marks that of Edmund Spenser, who died in 1598 in King Street, hard by, “for lacke of bread.” Yet Dean Stanley tells us that “his hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakespeare, attended! What a grave in which the pen of Shakespeare may be mouldering away!” Of the author of the “Faërie Queene” Milton himself said: “Our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” Near by to Spenser’s tomb is the monument to Ben Jonson, at some distance from his grave, as has just been said, and close at hand are the memorials to Dryden, Drayton, Cowley, and Francis Beaumont, Milton’s famous contemporaries. If the poet could have looked forward two generations he might have seen his own counterfeit presentment in marble upon these walls. By that time the royalist feeling against him had abated, and when in 1737 this belated recognition of his greatness was placed upon the wall, Doctor Gregory remarked to Doctor Johnson: “I have seen erected in the church a bust of that man whose name I once knew considered as a pollution of its walls.”
After Shakespeare’s death there was a strong desire to remove his bones from Stratford to the Abbey, upon which Milton and Jonson both protested. The former wrote:
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
and Jonson more emphatically exclaimed:
“My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further on to make thee room;
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.”
In St. Benedict’s Chapel may be noted the graves of Bishop Bilson, Doctor Tunson, Sir Robert Anstruther, and Sir Robert Ayton,—famous men of Milton’s time.