ws, the more active grows in normally constituted minds that
natural commemorative instinct, which seeks outward and tangible
expression. A strange fallacy underlies the objection that has been
taken to any commemoration of Shakespeare on the alleged ground that
Milton warned the English people of all time against erecting a
monument to Shakespeare.

In 1630 Milton asked the question that is familiar to thousands of
tongues:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones?

By way of answer he deprecated any such "weak witness of his name" as
"piled stones" or "star-y-pointing pyramid." The poet-laureate of
England echoed Milton's sentiment in 1905. He roundly asserted that
"perishable stuff" is the fit crown of monumental pedestals. "Gods for
themselves," he concluded, "have monument enough." There are ample
signs that the sentiment to which Milton and the laureate give voice
has a good deal of public support.

None the less the poet-laureate's conclusion is clearly refuted by
experience and cannot terminate the argument. At any rate, in the
classical and Renaissance eras monumental sculpture was in habitual
request among those who would honour both immortal gods and mortal
heroes--especially mortal heroes who had distinguished themselves in
literature or art.

A little reflection will show, likewise, that Milton's fervid couplets
have small bearing on the question at issue in its present conditions.
Milton's poem is an elegy on Shakespeare. It was penned when the
dramatist had lain in his grave less that fourteen years, and when the
writer was in his twenty-second year. The exuberant enthusiasm of
youth was couched in poetic imagery which has from time immemorial
been employed in panegyrics of great poets. The beautiful figure which
presents a great man's work as his only lasting monument is as old as
poetry itself. The conceit courses through the classical poetry of
Greece from the time of Pindar, and through that of Italy from the
time of Ennius. No great Renaissance writer of modern Italy, of
sixteenth-century France, or of Elizabethan England, tired of arguing
that the poet's deathless memorial is that carved by his own pen.
Shakespeare himself clothed the conceit in glowing harmonies in his
sonnets. Ben Jonson, in his elegy on the dramatist, adapted the
time-honoured figure when he hailed his dead friend's achievement as
"a monument without a tomb."

"The truest poetry is the most feigning," and, wh