“_I_ should not feel it to be strange” if a Baconian told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood’s words, “Was Dugdale’s bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of Stratford? Or was it thought that the presence of a woolsack” (the cushion) “might be taken as indicating that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support to a certain Lord Chancellor?” {186a} Such, indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say, I believe. Dugdale’s engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription, still on the monument: _Judicio Pylium_, _genio Socratem_, _arte Maronem_ _Terra tegit_, _populus mæret_, _Olympus habet_: “Earth covers, Olympus” (heaven? or the Muses’ Hill?) “holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his Dæmon” (“Genius”). As for the “Genius,” or dæmon of Socrates, and the permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the use of _Olympus_ for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. {186b} The poet who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) “a clayver man.” The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare’s daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. {187a} It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism. Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph. The famous “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,” and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of “the last lines written, we are told,” {187b} “by the author of _Hamlet_.” Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare’s authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen’s in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says,—criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. {187c} For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere of Stratford. Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will’s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father’s intelligence.