"Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellowes give The World thy Workes--thy Workes, by which outlive Thy touche thy name must; when that stone is rent, And Time dissolves thy Stratford monument, Here we alive shall view thee still." Crude and inartistic as it is, the bust must have had some likeness in its earlier days to have satisfied critical eyes; but it has passed through so many vicissitudes, and suffered so much restoration, that the likeness may have entirely vanished by this time. Nevertheless, it remains a witness to the affection of the surviving, and a witness, Puritans though they were, that it was on account of the power of _his pen_ that he deserved special remembrance. Upon a mural tablet are other verses, which would seem not to have been composed by his own friends, as they speak of Shakespeare's lying "within this monument." Whoever wrote them, the family accepted them, and the world has endorsed them: [Illustration] William Camden had finished his "Britannia" by 1617 (commenced in 1597), printed in 1625. He says of Stratford Church: "In the chancel lies William Shakespeare, a native of this place, who has given ample proof of his genius and great abilities in the forty-eight plays he has left behind him." It is evident that the First Folio, 1623, was _intended_ by his "fellows" at the Globe to stand as their monument to his memory, built of the plays that had become their private property by purchase. The verses that preface it, written by W. Basse, suggest that Shakespeare should have been buried by Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. But the author withdraws his wish. "Sleep, Brave Tragedian, Shakspere, sleep alone Thy unmolested rest, unshared cave Possess as Lord, not tenant to thy grave," etc. Archy's "Banquet of Jests," printed in 1630, tells of one travelling through Stratford, "a town most remarkable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare." In the same year is said to have been written Milton's memorable epitaph (printed 1632), a noble testimony from the Puritan genius to the power of his play-acting brother: "What needs my Shakspere for his honoured bones, The labour of an age in piled stones? Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Under a star y-pointing pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What needst thou such weak witness of thy fame? Thou, in our wonder and astonishment, Hast built thyself a live-long monument," etc. By 1651 had already been suggested an annual commemoration of his life in Samuel Sheppard's "Epigram on Shakspere," verse 6: "Where thy honoured bones do lie, As Statius once to Maro's urn, Thither every year will I Slowly tread and sadly turn."