The latter part of our author’s life was spent in ease and retirement, he had the good fortune to gather an estate, equal to his wants, and in that to his wish, and is said to have spent some years before his death in his native Stratford.  His pleasant wit and good nature engaged him in the acquaintance, and entitled him to the friendship, of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood.  It is still remembered in that county, that he had a particular intimacy with one Mr. Combe, an old gentleman, noted thereabouts for his wealth and usury.  It happened that in a pleasant conversation amongst their common friends, Mr. Combe merrily told Shakespear, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph, if he happened to out-live him; and since he could not know what might be said of him when dead, he desired it might be done immediately; upon which Shakespear gave him these lines.

  Ten in the hundred lyes here engraved,
  ’Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved: 
  If any man asketh who lies in this tomb? 
  Oh! oh! quoth the Devil, ’tis my John-a-Combe.

But the sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so severely, that he never forgave it.

Shakespear died in the fifty-third year of his age, and was buried on the North side of the chancel in the great church at Stratford, where a monument is placed on the wall.  The following is the inscription on his grave-stone.

  Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear,
  To dig the dust inclosed here. 
  Blest be the man that spares these stones,
  And curs’d be he that moves my bones. 
He had three daughters, of whom two lived to be married; Judith the elder to Mr. Thomas Quincy, by whom she had three sons, who all died without children, and Susannah, who was his favourite, to Dr. John Hall, a physician of good reputation in that county.  She left one child, a daughter, who was married to Thomas Nash, Esq; and afterwards to Sir John Bernard, of Abington, but deceased likewise without issue.

His dramatic writings were first published together in folio 1623 by some of the actors of the different companies they had been acted in, and perhaps by other servants of the theatre into whose hands copies might have fallen, and since republished by Mr. Rowe, Mr. Pope, Mr. Theobald, Sir Thomas Hanmer, and Mr. Warburton.

Ben Johnson in his discoveries has made a sort of essay towards the character of Shakespear.  I shall present it the reader in his own words,

’I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespear, that in writing he never blotted out a line.  My answer hath been, would he had blotted out a thousand! which they thought a malevolent speech.  I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who chuse that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted; and to justify my own character (for I lov’d the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any).  He was indeed honest,