"Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive while still thy books doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give."
So wrote Ben Jonson. With that thought, and the fact that, a hundred and twenty years after his death, a memorial to Shakespeare was put up in the Poets' Corner by public subscription, we must rest content. Ben Jonson himself was buried here, having in his imperious way demanded of the king "eighteen inches of ground in the Abbey," and so he remained in death "a child of Westminster." He had been educated at Westminster School, this turbulent, strong-spirited lad, with Border blood in him, who could never settle down to the trade of a builder, to which he had been apprenticed, and who was heard of among actors and playwriters. He was the friend of Shakespeare; indeed, it is said that the great man not only warmly praised his first play, "Every Man in his Humour," but acted in it himself at the Globe Theatre. Jonson produced a great number of plays and a still greater number of court masques. He was a master of plot, and everything he wrote was full of force and personality. Such a fiery character as his could hardly fail to lead him into a series of quarrels; but, in spite of this, he was held by his large circle of friends to be "the prince of good fellows," and the words, "O rare Ben Jonson," carved on his tomb by order of Sir John Young, "who, walking here when the grave was covering, gave the fellow eighteenpence to cut it," is an epitaph that came from the hearts of those who loved him and recognised his genius. Francis Beaumont, another Elizabethan playwriter, and the intimate friend of the whole group of dramatists, lies here; as does Michael Drayton, who wrote more than one hundred thousand lines of verse, and who, despite the fact that he was always quarrelling with his booksellers, whom he described as "a company of base knaves I scorn to kick," was known among his contemporaries as the "all-loved Drayton." Abraham Cowley, held in his day to be a great poet, had a magnificent funeral and a most flattering epitaph, but though one enthusiastic admirer went so far as to declare that the Great Fire left the Abbey untouched because Fate would that Cowley's tomb should be preserved, his works did not long survive him. Close to him was laid John Dryden, who as a boy had been well whipped by the great Doctor Busby. He says himself that he "endeavoured to write good English," and he produced several plays and some excellent political satires. He was not a great poet, but he had the knack of reasoning well in verse, of choosing apt words, and of writing vigorously. And we must remember that he lived in the days of the later Stuarts, when poets had well-nigh forgotten the sweet music of the Elizabethan age. Near to his tomb stands the bust of his bitter enemy, Shadwell, of whom he had written:—
"Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in all stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning made pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
Even so did the Abbey unite these rival poets-laureate.
POETS' CORNER
Another satirist, Samuel Butler, has a monument, but not a tomb, in the Abbey. He also died in abject poverty, and of him these lines were written, which apply to more than one of those commemorated in the Poets' Corner:—
"When Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive,
No generous patron would a dinner give.
Behold him starved to death and turned to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown:
He asked for bread, and he received a stone."
Thomas May, the historian; Davenant, the Royalist poet-laureate; Sir John Denham, a Royalist versifier, and John Phillips, a devoted imitator of Milton, are little more than names to us; but then we must remember that, with few exceptions, neither the poets nor the poetry of that period which ended with the death of William III. have lived on through our literature. With the accession of Anne there came a burst of new life, and the next great name we come to in the Abbey is that of Joseph Addison, the most charming of our prose writers. To find his grave, however, we must leave the Poets' Corner and go to General Monk's vault in Henry VII.'s Chapel. For here, close to his friend Charles Montagu, Lord Keeper, he of "piercing wit, gentle irony, and sparkling humour," the regular contributor to our two earliest newspapers, the Tattler and the Spectator, was buried. His own words, from an article in the Spectator when it was about twelve days old, best describe both the man and his aims: "It is with much satisfaction that I hear this great city enquiring day by day after these my papers, and receiving my morning lectures with a becoming seriousness and attention. My publisher tells me that already three thousand of them are distributed every day, so that if I allow twenty readers to every paper, I may reckon about threescore thousand disciples in London and Westminster, who, I hope, will take care to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless herd of their ignorant and unattentive brethren. I shall spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable and their diversion useful. For which reason I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality.... I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have recovered them from that desperate state of folly and vice into which the age is fallen. The mind that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up in follies that are only to be killed by assiduous culture. It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men, and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Then, having given his general aim, he goes on to especially commend his paper to all well-regulated families; to those gentlemen of leisure who consider the world a theatre, and desire to form a right judgment of those who are the actors on it; and to those "poor souls called the blanks of society, who are altogether unfurnished with ideas, who ask the first men they meet if there is any news stirring, and who know not what to talk about till twelve o'clock in the morning, by which time they are pretty good judges of the weather, and know which way the wind sets;" while finally he appeals to the female world: "I have often thought," he says, "that there has not been sufficient pains taken to find out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjusting of their hair the principal employment of their lives. This, I say, is the state of ordinary women, though I know there are multitudes of those that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, and that join all the beauties of mind to the ornaments of dress. I hope to increase the number of those by publishing this daily paper, which I shall always endeavour to make an innocent entertainment, and by that means at least divert the minds of my female readers from far greater trifles."
Faithfully and yet very pleasantly did Addison carry out his scheme. His humour was always kindly, his good sense was unvarying, his thoughts were always generous and true, and his easy unaffected language completed the charm. Instead of dropping to the level of his readers, he raised them to the much higher level on which he himself stood, and this without dull lecturing or violent denunciations. Religion, duty, love, honour, purity, truth, kindliness, and public-spiritedness were all real things to him, and he sought to make them everywhere realities too, gilding his little moral pills so cleverly, that until they were swallowed no one knew they were pills, and then they left nothing but a sweet taste behind.