No letter,--only two contemporary reports of his conversation, one
with regard to the commons enclosure as above, and the other in
circumstances not to be recited unnecessarily.

In a word we know his parentage, birth, marriage, fatherhood,
occupation, his wealth and his chief ambition, his will and his
death, and absolutely nothing else; his death being received with
unbroken and ominous silence by the literary world, not even Ben
Jonson who seven years later glorified the plays _in excelsis_,
expending so much as a quatrain on his memory.'

[Illustration: Plate III. The Stratford Monument,
From Dugdale's Warwickshire, 1656.]

[Illustration: Plate IV. The Stratford Monument as it appears
at the present time.]

To this statement by Mr. George Hookham I would add that we know W.
Shakspeare was christened 26th April 1564, that his Will which commences
"In the name of god Amen! I Willim Shackspeare, of Stratford upon Avon,
in the countie of warr gent in perfect health and memorie, god be
praysed," was dated 25th (January altered to) March 1616, and it was
proved 22nd June 1616, Shakspeare having died 23rd April 1616, four
weeks after the date of the Will.

We also know that a monument was erected to him in Stratford Church. And
because L. Digges, in his lines in the Shakespeare folio of 1623 says
"When Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment,"[1] it is supposed that the
monument must have been put up before 1623. But we should remember that
as Mrs. Stopes (who is by no means a Baconian) pointed out in the