The first line in italics, and the poetry throughout, are only to be equalled by a passage in an epitaph we have met with on a Lady of the name of Greenwood, of whom her husband says:--
"Her graces and her qualities were such That she might have married a bishop or a judge; But so extreme was her condescension and humility, That she married _me_, a poor doctor of divinity; _By which heroic deed_, she stands confest, Of all other women, the phoenix of her sex."
Sir Christopher is said to have died of a broken heart, because his once loving mistress exacted a debt of him which he found it difficult to pay. It was common to talk of courtiers dying of broken hearts at that time; which gives one an equal notion of the Queen's power, and the servility of those gentlemen. Fletcher, Bishop of London, father of the great poet, was another who had a tomb in the old church, and is said to have undergone the same fate. It was he that did a thing very unlike a poet's father. He attended the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and said aloud, when her head was held up by the executioner, "So perish all Queen Elizabeth's enemies!" He was then Dean of Peterborough. The Queen made him a bishop, but suspended him for marrying a second wife, which so preyed upon his feelings, that it is thought, by the help of an immoderate love of smoking, to have hastened his end--a catastrophe worthy of a mean courtier. He was well, sick, and dead, says Fuller, in a quarter of an hour. Most probably he died of apoplexy, the tobacco giving him the _coup de grace_.[31]
Dr. Donne, the head of the metaphysical poets, so well criticised by Johnson, was Dean of St. Paul's, and had a grave here, of which he has left an extraordinary memorial. It is a wooden image of himself, made to his order, and representing him as he was to appear in his shroud. This, for some time before he died, he kept by his bed-side in an open coffin, thus endeavouring to reconcile an uneasy imagination to the fate he could not avoid. It is still preserved in the vaults under the church, and is to be seen with the other curiosities of the cathedral. We will not do a great man such a disservice as to dig him up for a spectacle. A man should be judged of at the time when he is most himself, and not when he is about to consign his weak body to its elements.