"Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive while still thy books doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give."
So wrote Ben Jonson. With that thought, and the fact that, a hundred and twenty years after his death, a memorial to Shakespeare was put up in the Poets' Corner by public subscription, we must rest content. Ben Jonson himself was buried here, having in his imperious way demanded of the king "eighteen inches of ground in the Abbey," and so he remained in death "a child of Westminster." He had been educated at Westminster School, this turbulent, strong-spirited lad, with Border blood in him, who could never settle down to the trade of a builder, to which he had been apprenticed, and who was heard of among actors and playwriters. He was the friend of Shakespeare; indeed, it is said that the great man not only warmly praised his first play, "Every Man in his Humour," but acted in it himself at the Globe Theatre. Jonson produced a great number of plays and a still greater number of court masques. He was a master of plot, and everything he wrote was full of force and personality. Such a fiery character as his could hardly fail to lead him into a series of quarrels; but, in spite of this, he was held by his large circle of friends to be "the prince of good fellows," and the words, "O rare Ben Jonson," carved on his tomb by order of Sir John Young, "who, walking here when the grave was covering, gave the fellow eighteenpence to cut it," is an epitaph that came from the hearts of those who loved him and recognised his genius. Francis Beaumont, another Elizabethan playwriter, and the intimate friend of the whole group of dramatists, lies here; as does Michael Drayton, who wrote more than one hundred thousand lines of verse, and who, despite the fact that he was always quarrelling with his booksellers, whom he described as "a company of base knaves I scorn to kick," was known among his contemporaries as the "all-loved Drayton." Abraham Cowley, held in his day to be a great poet, had a magnificent funeral and a most flattering epitaph, but though one enthusiastic admirer went so far as to declare that the Great Fire left the Abbey untouched because Fate would that Cowley's tomb should be preserved, his works did not long survive him. Close to him was laid John Dryden, who as a boy had been well whipped by the great Doctor Busby. He says himself that he "endeavoured to write good English," and he produced several plays and some excellent political satires. He was not a great poet, but he had the knack of reasoning well in verse, of choosing apt words, and of writing vigorously. And we must remember that he lived in the days of the later Stuarts, when poets had well-nigh forgotten the sweet music of the Elizabethan age. Near to his tomb stands the bust of his bitter enemy, Shadwell, of whom he had written:--