In the same way I do not expect any
artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe's
Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for
anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made
a plaisir. In Pope's edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with
some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust
presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from
"the Chandos portrait," which, in my opinion, is of no more authority
than any other portrait of Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive,
was painted from the life.
The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust,
copied in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not
waste words over this speculation. Mr. Greenwood writes that "if I
should be told that Dugdale's effigy represented an elderly farmer
deploring an exceptionally bad harvest, 'I should not feel it to be
strange!' Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told
that it was the presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who
had fallen from high estate and recognised that all things are but
vanity."
"_I_ should not feel it to be strange" if a Baconian told me that the
effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the
dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I
were asked in reply, in Mr.
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