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.


"Witty above her sex, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in THAT, but THIS
Wholly of Him with whom she's now in bliss." {187d}


Thirty-three years after Shakespeare's death he was still thought