{475}
* * * * *
Minor Notes.
_Shakspeare's Monument._--When I was a young man, some thirty or forty
years ago, I visited the monument of Shakspeare, in the beautiful church of
Stratford-upon-Avon, and there copied, from the Album which is kept for the
names of visitors, the following lines:
"Stranger! to whom this monument is shown,
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone!
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste displays,
And smears his tombstone, as he marr'd his plays.
R. F.
Oct. 2, 1810."
This has just now been brought to my mind by reading, in page 155. of the
second volume of Moore's Journal, the following account of a conversation
at Bowood:
"Talked of Malone--a dull man--his whitewashing the statue of
Shakspeare, at Leamington or Stratford (?), and General Fitzpatrick's
(Lord L.'s uncle) epigram on the subject--very good--
'And smears his statue as he mars his lays.'"
I cannot but observe that the doubt expressed in the Diary of
Moore--whether Shakspeare's monument is "at Leamington or Stratford
(?)"--is curious, and I conceive my version of the last line, besides being
more correct, is also more pithy. It is incorrect, moreover, to call it a
_statue_, as it is a three-quarters bust in a niche in the wall.
The extract from _Moore's Diary_, however, satisfactorily explains the
initials "R. F.," which have hitherto puzzled me.