as those popular plays, _The Rivals_ and
_The School for Scandal_, by the other eighteenth-century Irish
dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose tombstone is beneath our
feet. That great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is responsible for
the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the
architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt
to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English
lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far more
often noticed:--

Life is a jest and all things show it;
I thought so once and now I know it.

A preposterous and affected statue to our left, with the immortal name of
Shakespeare below it, has distracted the eyes of our friends, and
comments are freely made when we tell them how nearly the bones of the
sweet Swan of Avon were brought from Stratford to this burial-place of
poets. The monument itself was erected by subscription more than a
century after Shakespeare's {48} death, but the removal of the body had
been averted long before by Ben Jonson's protest and the dramatist's
posthumous curse. The Scotchmen with us, who have just gazed with much
appreciation at Chantrey's bust of their national novelist, a replica of
the one at Abbotsford, now look up to the heavy-featured face of Burns,
their national poet. We pause to tell them that this memorial was placed
here twenty-one years ago, and was paid for with shilling subscriptions,
which were voluntarily contributed by all classes in Scotland, from the
highest to the lowest. Southey and Coleridge are the next on the eastern
wall, and we find their names familiar to all those who have toured in
the Lake country, although few of their works are read now by the
generality, save possibly Southey's _Life of Nelson_. Campbell's bust is
at the angle where we turn into the original Poets' Corner, and several
of those around us call to mind his still popular poems, notably
"Hohenlinden" and the "Battle of the Baltic." A few steps further and we
stand upon the vault of Edmund Spenser, that prince of poets, who was
buried in close proximity to the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of
English poetry. Within this vault moulder not only the dust of Spenser,
{49} but the funeral odes and the pens wherewith they were writ, which
his friends, the poets and literary men of the day, threw old Camden
tells us upon his coffin. Elizabeth herself, accordi