No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.--This was carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it was cut by "Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb-maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), "The performance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. It seems to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. This was "a good enough" Shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust--in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety--to be covered completely with a thick coat of white paint. * * While these pages are going through the press (April, 1879), however, we find a statement that within a year or two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one Simon Colling has applied a bath to the bust--removing Malone's whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be underneath. {098}From this bust, Mr. Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays, in which case it is entitled "Cast of the head of William Shakespeare, taken after death," which may or may not--for Mr. Boaden can not tell us who this "Mr. Bullock" was--be the German "Death Mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the statement "taken after death"--"William Shakespeare being unquestionably dead at the time--is literally true.)