Shakespeare’s Doctor
Under this heading the Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung says that a gravestone in the church-yard of Fredericksburg bears an inscription which is thus translated:
“Here lies Edward Heldon, a medical and surgical practitioner, the friend and companion of William Shakespeare, of Avon. He died after a short illness in the year of our Lord 1618, in the seventieth year of his age.”
In St. Stephen’s church-yard, Launceston, Cornwall, is an epitaph whose quaintness reminds us of the appeal in the inscription on the gravestone of Shakespeare, in the Stratford Church, though without its blessing and menace:
’Tis my request
My bones may rest
Within this chest
Without molest.
In Ickworth Church, Suffolk, is the following tribute to Lady Elizabeth Mansel:
Just in the noon of life—those golden days
When the mind ripens ere the form decays,
The hand of fate untimely cut her thread,
And left the world to weep that virtue fled,
Its pride when living, and its grief when dead.