ABSTRACT
Date and publication. This untitled and undated poem was inscribed in a memorial tablet, surmounted by a coat of arms, on the wall of St Leonard’s Church, Great Catworth, Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire). The poem is preceded by the following inscription: ‘Near this Place / Was Interred Dr JOHN LAWTON & / Mrs ROSE DRIDEN his second Wife / He was a Pious Man and learned both in Divinity and / A Phisick and diligently improued Both Studies to ye Glory of God / And to the good of his Neighbour. / She was Daughter of ERASMVS DRIDEN son ofsr ERASMVS / DRIDEN of Canons Ashby in Northamptonshir, and Mrs Mary Pickering / His Wife by whom He had 14 Children the Eldest was / JOHN DRYDEN Es the LAUREAT of his time who / Married the Lady Elizabeth Howard Daughter to Henry Earl of Berkshire / By whom She had 3 Sons Charls John & Erasmus, who all die fine yong Gentlemen / The 2d Brother to Mrs Lawton is the present Sr Erasmus Dryden of Canons Ashby / By lineal descent an ancient Baronet. / She was very Beautifull and Pleasant in Her youth allways Good, and / Charitable allmost beyond her power, in which she followed the rare Example / Of her Excelent Mother. Mrs Lawton liued in this Town neer 40 years / And died Lamented Decem 26 1710 in the 77 yeare of her age / Hauing first buried her only Child ERASMUS LAWTON: / On whom her Brother Wrote these lines’. After D.’s poem, the following words are added: ‘This was placed here by A Relation of Hers / Whos frindship reaches beyond the Grave’. The poem was first printed from the inscription in Sir James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone (1860). The inscribed and printed texts of the poem are verbally identical.
