ng to a contemporary
writer, mindful of the tribute paid to her in the _Fairie Queen_, ordered
a monument to be erected in honour of her poet, but this was never done:
she died three years later, and some said that a greedy courtier
embezzled the money intended for this purpose. Whatever the truth, a
literary Countess, Lady Dorset, repaired the omission twenty years
afterwards, but by the following century her memorial had crumbled away,
and was replaced by a copy, for which Gray's friend Mason collected a sum
of money. After Spenser's burial this part of the transept was dedicated
to the memory of poets, and amongst many forgotten names are others of
undying fame. Before us, for instance, are Ben Jonson and Milton.
Jonson, who knew Shakespeare and owed much to his friendship with Lord
Bacon, died as did so many of his literary contemporaries, in poor
circumstances: like Chaucer and Spenser, he ended his life in a house
close to the Abbey, in King Street, which was recently demolished. His
body was buried in the nave, {50} standing upright on its feet; the words
"O rare Ben Jonson," which are repeated on the monument, were cut upon
the stone at the charge of a certain Sir Jack Young, who happened to be
passing when the mason was fixing the gravestone. The ancient
inscription has been placed against the wall to preserve the lettering,
and a modern paving stone marks the place of the vault. The buttons of
the poet's coat, which are on the wrong side in his bust, gave rise to
the couplet:--

O rare Ben Jonson, what a turncoat grown,
Thou ne'er wast such till thou wast carved in stone.

While roystering Ben waited a hundred years before his literary
distinction was recognised by this memorial in Poets' Corner, the
strength of Royalist feeling kept Milton's name out of the Abbey
altogether for the same period after his death. Thus, although both men
died in the seventeenth century, their monuments date from the middle of
the eighteenth. Milton's name was regarded as anathema by the loyal
Chapter, and it was not till long after the Jacobite Atterbury's exile,
that a Dean (Wilcocks) was broad-minded enough to acknowledge Milton's
genius, and allow an admirer of his, one Benson, to put up a monument.
The lyric muse above Gray's medallion {51} close by, points to the bust
of that master of poetry and prose, to whom he and all the poets ever
since Milton's time owe so much. Gray himself must always be remembered
in