Addison, in The Spectator, No. 323., speaks of this epitaph as "written by an uncertain author." This was not more than seventy-five or eighty years after Jonson's death. In the lives of the Sidneys, and in Ballard's Memoirs of Celebrated Ladies (1752), no author is mentioned; but the latter speaks of the epitaph as likely to be more lasting than marble or brass. To the six lines which generally stand alone, the following are added in the two last-mentioned works:
"Marble pyles let no man raise,
To her name, for after daies,
Some kind woman, born as she,
Reading this like Niobe,
Shall turn marble, and become,
Both her mourner and her tomb."
These are also given by Brydges in his Peers Of James II., but they are not in Jonson's works. Did they originally form part of the epitaph, or are they the production of another and later author?
That this epitaph should be attributed to Jonson, may possibly have arisen from the following lines being confounded with it. Jacob, in his English Poets, says—
"To show that Ben was famous at epigram, I need only transcribe the epitaph he wrote on the Lady Elizabeth L. H.:
"Underneath this stone doth lie
As much virtue as could die,
Which when alive did harbour give
To as much beauty as could live.