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evidence of the prosaic character of his mind; and if there be some truth in the axiom of Shakspere, that

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,"

we hold, upon the same principle, that the man who speaks in this literal way of the "person that Shakspere writes of," was a fit man to root up Shakspere's mulberry-tree; pull down the house which had some associations with the mcre ancient structure in which the author of some of the greatest productions of the human intellect had lived and died; and feel not the slightest regret in abandoning the gardens which the matchless man had cultivated.

It is a singular fact that no drawings or prints exist of New Place as Shakspere left it, or at any period before the new house was built by Sir Hugh Clopton. It is a more singular fact that although Garrick had been there only fourteen years before the destruction, visiting the place with a feeling of veneration that might have led him and others to preserve some memorial of it, there is no trace whatever existing of

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what New Place was before 1757. The wood-cut here given is a fac-simile of an engraving, first published by Malone, and subsequently appended to the variorum editions, which is thus described :-" New Place, from a drawing in the margin of an Ancient Survey, made by order of Sir George Carew (afterwards Baron Carew of Clopton, and Earl of Totnes), and found at Clopton, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1786." A person resident at Stratford at the period mentioned as that of the finding of the drawing-Poet Jordan, as he was called-an ignorant person, but ready enough to impose upon antiquarian credulity-an instrument perhaps in the hands of others-he sent to Malone this drawing of New Place from the margin of an ancient survey. If it was a survey found at Clopton, it was a survey of the Clopton property in the possession of the Earl of Totness, who was a contemporary

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of Shakspere. New Place, as Malone knew, had been out of the Clopton family fifty years when Shakspere bought it. The drawing is found on the margin of an ancient survey. It is not described in the margin, or elsewhere, as New Place. Immediately opposite New Place is a house which, though altered, is still a very old house. The gables have been concealed by a parapet, the windows have been modernized; but the gables are still to be traced upon ascending the roof. Restore the gables and windows to their primitive state, and we have the very house represented upon "the margin of an ancient survey." That house, which is now occupied by Mr. Hunt, the town-clerk of Stratford, did belong to the Earl of Totness. But look at Shakspere's arms over the door, the "spear in bend." How do we account for this? There is a letter written by Malone on the 15th of April, 1790, to his convenient friend at Stratford, "good Mr. Jordan," in which the following passage occurs :-" Mr. Malone would be glad to have Shakspeare's house on the same scale as that of Sir Hugh Clopton's. He thinks the arms of Shakspere a very proper ornament over the door, and very likely to have been there; and neat wooden pales may be placed with propriety before the house." And yet this man was the most bitter denouncer of the Ireland forgeries; and shows up, as he had a just right to do, the imposition of the "View of my Masterre Irelande's House," with two coats-of-arms beneath it. Good Mr. Jordan, when, in the pride of his heart at having such a correspondent, he gave a copy of Malone's letter to a gentleman at Stratford, admitted that he had, of his own accord, added the porch to the house represented "in the margin of an ancient survey "*

The register of marriages at Stratford-upon-Avon, for the year 1607, contains the following entry :—

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John hall youthma & Enfarma &quesper

Susanna, the eldest daughter of William Shakspere, was now twenty-four years of age. John Hall, gentleman, a physician settled at Stratford, was in his thirtysecond year. This appears in every respect to have been a propitious alliance. Shakspere received into his family a man of learning and talent. Dr. Hall lived at a period when medicine was throwing off the empirical rules by which it had been too long directed; and a school of zealous practitioners were beginning to rise up who founded their success upon careful observation. It was the age which produced the great discoveries of Harvey. Shakspere's son-in-law belonged to this school of patient and accurate observers. He kept a record of the cases which came under his care; and his notes, commencing in the year 1617, still exist in manuscript. The minutes of his earlier practice are probably lost. The more remarkable of the cases were published more than twenty years

* See Note at the end of the Volume.

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after his death, being translated from the original Latin by James Cooke, and given to the world under the title of Select Observations on English Bodies, or Cures in desperate Diseases.' This work went through three editions.

Fotall

[Signature of Dr. Hall.]

The season at which the marriage of Shakspere's elder daughter took place would appear to give some corroboration to the belief that, at this period, he had wholly ceased to be an actor. It is not likely that an event to him so deeply interesting would have taken place during his absence from Stratford.

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It was the season of performances at the Globe; when the eager multitude who crowded the pit might look up through the open roof upon a brilliant sky; and when the poet, whose productions were the chief attraction of that stage, might

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rejoice that he could wander in the free woods, and the fresh fields, from the spring time,

"When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

to the last days of autumn, when he saw

"The summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard."

A pleasanter residence than Stratford, independent of all the early associ ations which endeared it to the heart of Shakspere, would have been difficult to find as a poet's resting-place. It was a town, as most old English towns were, of houses amidst gardens. Built of timber, it had been repeatedly devastated by fires. In 1594 and 1595 a vast number of houses had been thus destroyed; but they were probably small tenements and hovels. New houses arose of a better order; and one still exists, bearing the date on its front of 1596, which indicates something of the picturesque beauty of an old country town before the days arrived which, by one accord, were to be called elegant and refined-their elegance and refinement chiefly consisting in sweeping away our national architecture, and our national poetry, to substitute buildings and books which, to vindicate their own exclusive pretensions to utility, rejected every grace that invention could bestow, and in labouring for a dull uniformity, lost even the character of proportion. Shakspere's own house was no doubt one of those quaint buildings which were pulled down in the last generation, to set up four walls of plain brick, with equi-distant holes called doors and windows. His garden was a spacious one. The Avon washed its banks; and within its

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enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers. If the poet walked forth, a few steps brought him into the country. Near the pretty hamlet of Shottery lay his own grounds of Bishopton, then part of the great common field of Stratford. Not far from the ancient chapel of Bishopton, of which Dugdale has preserved a representation

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and the walls of which still remain, would he watch the operation of seed-time and harvest. If he passed the church and the mill, he was in the pleasant meadows that skirted the Avon on the pathway to Ludington. If he desired to cross the river, he might now do so without going round by the great bridge; for in 1599, soon after he bought New Place, the pretty foot-bridge was erected which still bears that date. His walks and his farm-labours were his recreations. But they were not his only pleasures. It is at this period that we can fix the date of Lear. That wonderful tragedy was first published in 1608; and the title-page recites that "It was plaid before the King's Majesty at WhiteHall, uppon S. Stephen's Night; in Christmas Hollidaies." This most extraordinary production might well have been the first fruits of a period of comparative leisure; when the creative faculty was wholly untrammelled by petty cares, and the judgment might be employed in working again and again upon the first conceptions, so as to produce such a masterpiece of consummate art without after labour. The next season of repose gave birth to an effort of genius wholly different in character; but almost as wonderful in its profound sagacity and knowledge of the world, as Lear is unequalled for its depth of individual passion. Troilus and Cressida was published in 1609. Both these publications were probably made without the consent of the author; but it would seem that these plays were first produced before the Court, and there

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might have been circumstances which would have rendered it difficult or impossible to prevent their publication, in the same way that the publication was prevented of any other plays after 1603, and during the author's life-time.* We may well believe that the Sonnets were published in 1609, without the consent of their author. That the appearance of those remarkable lyrics should

See Introductory Notice to Troilus and Cressida.

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