One of the earliest of the elegies was a sonnet by William Basse, who gave picturesque expression to the conviction that Shakespeare would enjoy for all time an unique reverence on the part of his countrymen. In the opening lines of his poem Basse apostrophised Chaucer, Spenser, and the dramatist Francis Beaumont, three poets who had already received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey--Beaumont, the youngest of them, only five weeks before Shakespeare died. To this honoured trio Basse made appeal to "lie a thought more nigh" one another, so as to make room for the newly-dead Shakespeare within their "sacred sepulchre." Then, in the second half of his sonnet, the poet, developing a new thought, argued that Shakespeare, in right of his pre-eminence, merited a burial-place apart from all his fellows. With a glance at Shakespeare's distant grave in the chancel of Stratford-on-Avon Church, the writer exclaimed:-- Under this carved marble of thine own Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep _alone_. The fine sentiment found many a splendid echo. It resounded in Ben Jonson's lines of 1623:-- My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further to make thee a 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. Milton wrote a few years later, in 1630, how Shakespeare, "sepulchred" in "the monument" of his writings, in such pomp doth lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. Never was a glorious immortality foretold for any man with more solemn confidence than it was foretold for Shakespeare at his death by his circle of adorers. When Time, one elegist said, should dissolve his "Stratford monument," the laurel about Shakespeare's brow would wear its greenest hue. Shakespeare's critical friend, Ben Jonson, was but one of a numerous band who imagined the "sweet swan of Avon," "the star of poets," shining for ever as a constellation in the firmament. Such was the invariable temper in which literary men gave vent to their grief on learning the death of the "beloved author," "the famous scenicke poet," "the admirable dramaticke poet," "that famous writer and actor," "worthy master William Shakespeare" of Stratford-on-Avon. II