Whoever treadeth on this stone, I pray you tread most neatly; For underneath the same doth lye, Your honest friend, William Wheatley. _Ratcliff Hamlet_. GEORGE CLARK, A.D. 1668. If any desire to be me nigh, Pray let my bones in quiet ly, Till Christ shall come in cloudy sky, Who will us all both judge and try. EDWARD NORRYS. O ye, our friends, yat here pas by, We beseech you to have us in memory; Somtym we were as now ye be, In tym to come ye shall be as we. NATHANIEL SPENCER, 1695. Pray think on me as you pass by, As you are now so once was I. _St. James_, _Clerkenwell_. I have in my possession a Tour through England, by the Rev. R. Warner, in 1801; he gives an account which I have never seen alluded to, of a visit to Stratford-on-Avon. The mention of “cupboard, chair, and tobacco-stopper” is delightful. Vol. II. p. 272, Topographical Works of Rev. R. Warner, 1802. “On inquiring for the birth-place of our great poet, we were not a little surprised to be carried through a small butcher’s shop into a dirty back room; which, together with a miserable apartment above stairs, constituted the greater part of the house of his father, Mr. John Shakespeare, a wool-stapler, in the sixteenth century, where William was born April 23, 1564. Here are piously preserved the chair in which he sat, and the cupboard in which he kept his books. A tobacco-stopper also was shown us, said to be that which he had been accustomed to use for some years; but as we found this inestimable relic might have been purchased for 1_s._ 6_d._, and that parts of the chair and cupboard might be procured upon similar reasonable terms, we were as much inclined to give credit to their genuineness, as we had felt ourselves willing to believe the traditions of Guy Earl of Warwick, his shield, sword, and porridge-pot. Homely as the tenement was, however, we had much gratification in recollecting that it had been the birth-place of our great poet, and the scene where the first dawning of his gigantic intellect was displayed.”