1616. Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, the celebrated Spanish author, died.
Cervantes was born in 1549; he is best known in England by his “Don
Quixote,” which has rendered him popular throughout Europe.
1616. On the same day with Cervantes in Spain, Shakspeare died in
England. It was the anniversary of his birth-day, whereon he had
completed the fifty-second year of his age. Who is qualified to praise
him, whose supereminent genius all men acknowledge and reverence? To his
greatness he added a quality it is seldom allied with. “No man had ever
fewer enemies alive or dead; and this is the more remarkable as he was
himself prone to parody, and must therefore have mortified many of his
contemporaries.”[108]
Goodness and he fill up one monument.
_Shakspeare’s Jest Book._
Under this title a book was reprinted in 1815, from one lately
discovered bearing the title of
¶ A. C. Mery Talys.
Referring to the preface of the reprint for its value in support of the
opinion corroborated by other reprints, that Shakspeare was destitute of
the learning attributed to him by some writers, an extract (with the
spelling modernized) is taken from it as a specimen of the wit, and
morals which amused our ancestors.
_Of the woman that followed her fourth husband’s bier and wept._
A woman there was which had four husbands. It fortuned also that her
fourth husband died and was brought to church upon the bier, whom this
woman followed, and made great moan, and waxed very sorry, insomuch that
her neighbours thought she would swoon and die for sorrow; wherefore one
of her gossips came to her and spake to her in her ear, and bade her for
God’s sake comfort herself and refrain that lamentation, or else it
would hurt her, and peradventure put her in jeopardy of her life. To
whom this woman answered and said “I wys good gossip I have great cause
to mourn if ye knew all, for I have buried three husbands beside this
man, but I was never in the case that I am now, for there was not one of
them but when that I followed the corse to church, yet I was sure of
another husband, before the corse came out of my house; and now I am
sure of no other husband, and therefore ye may be sure I have great
cause to be sad and heavy.”
By this tale ye may see, that the old proverb is true, that it is as
great a pity to see a woman weep, as a goose to go barefoot.
If the moral deduced by the story-teller from the tale just related is
satirical on the sex, it should be remembered, that he wrote at a period
when jokes were homely, and less felt than in our refined times. To talk
now of “no joke like a _true_ joke” is scarcely passable, unless the
application be in itself true, and then it is no longer a joke.