William died Jan. 19, buried Jan. 26, 1728-9. His funeral. with the account of the Everlasting Club, or the Loves of Hilpa Ten years after followed a funeral of which the inward contrast in the midst of outward likeness to that of Addison is complete. As he, for the sake of his beloved patron, Montague, had been laid apart from the rest of the poetic tribe in the Chapel of the Tudors, in the far east of Congreve, the church, so Congreve was laid almost as completely separated from them in the Nave, in the neighbourhood if not in the vault of his patroness-Henrietta Godolphin, the second Duchess of Marlborough. By that questionable alliance he, amongst the Westminster notables, the worst corrupter, as Addison the noblest purifier, of English literature, was honoured with a sumptuous funeral, also from the Jerusalem Chamber; and with the same strange passion which caused the Duchess to have a statue of him in ivory, moving by clockwork, placed daily at her table, and a wax doll, whose feet were regularly blistered and anointed by the doctors, as Congreve's had been when he suffered from the gout,' she erected the monument to him at the west end of the church, commemorating the happiness and honour which 'she had enjoyed in her intercourse.'Happiness, perhaps,' exclaimed her inexorable mother, the ancient Sarah; she 'cannot say "honour!" Yet, though private partiality may have fixed the spot, his burial in the Abbey was justified by Macaulay's Essays (8vo. 1853), iii. 443.-To this must be added the recent inscription of Tickell's verses 6 over his grave by Lord Ellesmere. 2 Macaulay's Essays, vi. 531. the fame which attracted the visit of Voltaire to him, as to All is hush'd and still as death.-'Tis dreadful! He who reads these lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before; but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.2 monu ment. Prior, buried We return to the South Transept. Matthew Prior claimed Matthew a place there, as well by his clever and agreeable verses, as by his diplomatic career and his connexion with Westminster Sept. 25, School. The monument, ' as a last piece of human vanity,' was provided by his son; the bust was a present from Louis XIV., 1 Congreve himself judged more wisely. I wish to be visited on no other footing than as a gentleman who leads a life of plainness and 'simplicity. Such is his appearance on his monument. (See the whole story 1721. John Gay, died 1732. His funeral, Dec. 23, 1732. whom he had known on his embassy to Paris, and may serve to remind us of his rebuke to the Great Monarch when he replied at Versailles, I represent a king who not only fights 'battles, but wins them;' the inscription was by Dr. Freind, Head Master of Westminster, 'in honour of one who had 'done so great honour to the school." I had not strength enough [writes Atterbury] to attend Mr. Prior to his grave, else I would have done it, to have shown his friends that I had forgot and forgiven what he wrote to me. He is buried, as he desired, at the feet of Spenser, and I will take care to make good in every respect what I said to him when living; particularly as to the triplet he wrote for his own epitaph; which, while we were in good terms, I promised him should never appear on his tomb while I was Dean of Westminster.2 4 6 36 Ten years afterwards another blow fell on the literary circle. Gay's Fables,' written for the education of the Duke of Cumberland, still attract English children to his monument. But his playful, amiable character can only be appreciated by reading the letters of his contemporaries. We have all had,' writes Dr. Arbuthnot, another loss, of our worthy and dear 'friend Dr. Gay. It was some alleviation of my grief to see him so universally lamented by almost everybody, even by 'those who only knew him by reputation. He was interred at 'Westminster Abbey, as if he had been a peer of the realm; ' and the good Duke of Queensberry, who lamented him as a 'brother, will set up a handsome monument upon him.' His body was brought by the Company of Upholders from the Duke of Queensberry's to Exeter Change, and thence to the Abbey, at eight o'clock in the winter evening. Lord Chesterfield and Pope were present amongst the mourners.1 My dear Mr. Pope, whom I love as my own soul, if you survive me, as you certainly will, if a stone shall mark the place of my grave, see these words put upon it Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought it once, but now I know it, His wish was complied with. The conclusion specially points These are thy honours! not that here thy bust This last line, which was altered at the suggestion of Swift,3 is so dark that few understand it, and so harsh when it is explained that still fewer approve it.'4 With Gay is concluded, as far as the Abbey is concerned, the last of the brilliant circle of friends whose mutual correspondence and friendship gives such an additional interest to their graves. One of these, however, we sorely miss. I have been told of one Pope,' says Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher, as he wanders through Poets' Corner, murmuring at the obscure names of which he had never heard before: Is 'he there?' 'It is time enough,' replied his guide, 'these hundred years: he is not long dead: people have not done hating him yet.' It was not, however, the hate of his contemporaries that kept his bust out of the Abbey," but his own Biog. Brit. iv. 2167, 2187. 2 To make room for the monument, Butler's bust (by permission of Alderman Barber) was removed to its present position. (Chapter Book, October 31, 1733.) From 'striking their aching bosoms.' (Biog. Brit. iv. 2187.) Johnson, iii. 215. ' Pope, iii. 382. Pope, died May 30, 1744, buried at Twicken ham. His epitaph. deliberate wish to be interred, by the side' of his beloved For one that would not be buried in Westminster Abbey. In peace let one poor poet sleep, Let Horace blush, and Virgil too. The Little Nightingale,' who withdrew from the boisterous company of London to those quiet shades, only to revisit them in his little chariot like 'Homer in a nutshell,'2 naturally rests there at last. With Pope's secession the line of poets is broken for a time. None whose claims rested on their poetic merits only were, after him, buried within the Abbey, till quite our Thomson, own days. Thomson, whose bust appears by the side of Richmond, Shakspeare's monument, was interred in the parish church of 1748; his his own favourite Richmond buried at monument in the Abbey, erected 1762. Gray, buried at Stoke Pogis, 1771 Mason, buried at Aston, in York shire, 1797. In yonder grave a Druid lies.3 Gray could be buried nowhere but in that country churchyard of Stoke Pogis, which he has rendered immortal by his elegy, and in which he anticipates his rest. His monument, however, is placed by Milton's; and, both by the art of the sculptor, and the verses inscribed upon it by his friend Mason, is made to point not unfitly to Milton, thus completing that cycle of growing honour which we saw beginning from the tablet of Philips. And next to this cenotaph is also, in a natural sequence, that of Mason himself, with an inscription by his own friend Hurd. His filial piety excels Whatever genuine story tells.' 2 Thackeray's Humourists, p. 207. 3 Collins's Ode. See pp. 306, 307. |