basest calumnies against the monastic character satisfies us that the play was written by one who formed a much lower estimate than Shakspere did of the dignity of the poet's office, as an instructor of the people.

A deep reverence for antiquity is one of the clearest indications of the intimate union of the poetical and the philosophical temperament. An able writer of our own day has indeed said, "In some, the love of antiquity produces a sort of fanciful illusion: and the very sight of those buildings, so magnificent in their prosperous hour, so beautiful even in their present ruin, begets a sympathy for those who founded and inhabited them."* But, rightly considered, the fanciful illusion becomes a reasonable principle. Those who founded and inhabited these monastic buildings were for ages the chief directors of the national mind. Their possessions were, in truth, the possessions of all classes of the people. The highest offices in those establishments were in some cases bestowed upon the noble and the wealthy, but they were open to the very humblest. The studious and the devout here found a shelter and a solace. The learning of the monastic bodies has been underrated; the ages in which they flourished have been called dark ages; but they were almost the sole depositories of the knowledge of the land. They were the historians, the grammarians, the poets. They accumulated magnificent libraries. They were the barriers that checked the universal empire of brute force. They cherished an ambition higher and more permanent than could belong to the mere martial spirit. They stood between the strong and the weak. They held the oppressor in subjection to that power which results from the cultivation, however misdirected, of the spiritual part of our nature. Whilst the proud baron continued to live in the same dismal castle that his predatory fathers had built or won, the churchmen went on from age to age adding to their splendid edifices, and demanding a succession of ingenious artists to carry out their lofty ideas. The devotional exercises of their life touched the deepest feelings of the human heart. Their solemn services, handed down from a remote antiquity, gave to music its most ennobling cultivation; and the most beautiful of arts thus became the vehicle of the loftiest enthusiasm. Individuals amongst them, bringing odium upon the class, might be sordid, luxurious, idle, in some instances profligate. It is the nature of great prosperity and apparent security to produce these results. But it was not the mandate of a pampered tyrant, nor the edicts of a corrupt parliament, that could destroy the reverence which had been produced by an intercourse of eight hundred years with the great body of the people. The form of venerable institutions may be changed, but their spirit is indestructible. The holy places and mansions of the Church were swept away; but the memory of them could not be destroyed. Their ruins, recent as they were, were still antiquities, full of instruction. The lightning had blasted the old oak, and its green leaves were no longer put forth; but the gnarled trunk was a thing not to be despised. The convulsion which had torn the land was of a nature to make deep thinkers. After the wonder and the disappointment of great revolutions have subsided, there must always be an outgushing of earnest thought. The form which that thought may assume may be the result of accident; it may be poetical or metaphysical, historical or scientific. By a combination of circumstances,-perhaps by the circumstance of one man being born who had the most marvellous insight into human nature, and whose mind could penetrate all the disguises of the social state,—the drama became the great exponent of the thought of the age of Elizabeth. It was altogether a new form for English poetry to put on. The drama, as we have seen, had been the humblest vehicle for popular excitement. When the Church ceased to use it as an instrument of instruction, it fell into the hands of illiterate mimics. The courtly writers were too busy with their affectations and their flatteries

*Hallam's "Constitutional History of England."

to recognise its power, and its especial applicability to the new state of society. Those who were of the people; who watched the manifestations of the popular feeling and understanding; whose minds had been stirred up by the political storms, the violence of which had indeed passed away, but under whose influence the whole social state still heaved like a disturbed sea;-those were to build up our great national drama. But, at the period of which we are speaking, they were for the most part boys, or very young men. It is perhaps fortunate for us that the most eminent of these was introduced to the knowledge of life under no particular advantages; was not dedicated to any one of the learned professions; was cloistered not in an university; was an adherent of no party; was obliged to look forward to the necessity of earning his own maintenance, and yet not humiliated by poverty and meanness. William Shakspere looked upon the very remarkable state of society with which he was surrounded, with a free spirit. But he saw at one and the same time the present and the past. He knew that the entire social state is a thing of progress; that the characters of men are as much dependent upon remote influences as upon the matters with which they come in daily contact; that the individual essentially belongs to the general, and the temporary to the universal. His drama can never be antiquated, because he primarily deals with whatever is permanent and indestructible in the aspects of external nature, and in the constitution of the human mind. But, at the same time, it is no less a faithful transcript of the prevailing modes of thought even of his own day. Individual peculiarities, in his time called humours, he left to others.

This principle of looking at life with an utter disregard of all party and sectarian feelings, of massing all his observations upon individual character, could have proceeded only from a profound knowledge of the past, and a more than common apprehension of the future. As we have endeavoured to show, the localities amidst which he lived were highly favourable to his cultivation of a poetical reverence for antiquity. But his unerring observation of the present prevented the past becoming to him an illusion. He had always an earnest patriotism; he had a strong sense of the blessings which had been conferred upon his own day through the security won out of peril and suffering by the middle classes. The destruction of the old institutions, after the first evil effects had been mitigated by the energy of the people, had diffused capital, and had caused it to be employed with more activity. But he, who scarcely ever stops to notice the political aspects of his own day, cannot forbear an indignant comment upon the sufferings of the very poorest, which, if not caused by, were at least coincident with, the great spoliation of the property of the Church. Poor Tom, "who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned," was no fanciful portrait; he is the creature of the pauper legislation of half a century. Exhortations in the churches, "for the furtherance of the relief of such as were in unfeigned misery," were prescribed by the statute of the 1st of Edward VI.; but the same statute directs that the unhappy wanderer, after certain forms of proving that he has not offered himself for work, shall be marked V with a hot iron upon his breast, and adjudged to be "a slave" for two years to him who brings him before justices of the peace; and the statute goes on to direct the slaveowner "to cause the said slave to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." Three years afterwards the statute is repealed, seeing that it could not be carried into effect by reason of the multitude of vagabonds and the extremity of their wants. The whipping and the stocking were applied by successive enactments of Elizabeth. The gallows, too, was always at hand to make an end of the wanderers, when, hunted from tithing to tithing, they inevitably became thieves. Nothing but a compulsory provision for the maintenance of the poor could then have saved England from a * "King Lear," Act III., Scene IV.

fearful Jacquerie. It cannot reasonably be doubted that the vast destruction of capital, by the dissolution of the monasteries, threw for many years a quantity of superfluous labour upon the yet unsettled capital of the ordinary industry of the country. The prodigious changes in the value of money, favourable as they ultimately were to the development of industry, raised the prices of commodities without raising wages,-an inevitable consequence of that natural law which makes wages wholly depend upon the number of the labourers. That Shakspere had witnessed much social misery is evident from his constant disposition to descry "a soul of goodness in things evil," and from his indignant hatred of the heartlessness of petty authority:

"Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand."*

And yet, with many social evils about him, the age of Shakspere's youth was one in which the people were making a great intellectual progress. The poor were ill provided for. The Church was in an unsettled state, attacked by the natural restlessness of those who looked upon the Reformation with regret and hatred; and by the rigid enemies of its traditionary ceremonies and ancient observances, who had sprung up in its bosom. The promises which had been made that education should be fostered by the State had utterly failed; for even the preservation of the universities, and the protection and establishment of a few grammar-schools, had been unwillingly conceded by the avarice of those daring statesmen who had swallowed up the riches of the ancient establishment. The genial spirit of the English yeomanry had received a check from the intolerance of the powerful sect who frowned upon all sports and recreations-who despised the arts-who held poets and pipers to be "caterpillars of a commonwealth." But yet the wonderful stirring up of the intellect of the nation had made it an age favourable for the cultivation of the highest literature; and most favourable to those who looked upon society, as the young Shakspere must have looked, in the spirit of cordial enjoyment and practical wisdom.

*"Lear," Act IV., Scene VI.

DECAY, followed by reproduction, is the order of nature; and so, if the vital power of society be not extinct, the men of one generation attempt to repair what the folly or the wickedness of their predecessors has destroyed. Sumptuous abbeys were pulled down in the reign of Henry VIII.; but humble parish-churches rose up in the reign of Elizabeth. Within four miles of Stratford, on the opposite bank of the Avon, is the pretty village of Welford; and here is a church which bears the date of 1568 carved upon its wall. Although the church was new, the people would cling, and perhaps more pertinaciously than ever, to the old usages connected with their church. They certainly would not forego their Wake,-"an ancient custom among the Christians of this island to keep a feast every year upon a certain week or day in remembrance of the finishing of the building of their parish-church, and of the first solemn dedicating of it to the service of God."* For fifty years after the period of which we are writing, the wakes prevailed, more or less, throughout England. The Puritans had striven to put them down; but the opposite party in the Church as zealously encouraged them. Charles I. spoke the voice of this party in one of his celebrated declarations for sports, which gave such deep, and in some

* Brand's "Popular Antiquities," by Ellis, 1841, vol. ii. page 1.

respects just, offence. In 1633 the King's declaration in favour of wakes was as follows:-" "In some counties of this kingdom, his Majesty finds that, under pretence of taking away abuses, there hath been a general forbidding, not only of ordinary meetings, but of the feasts of the dedication of the churches, commonly called Wakes. Now, his Majesty's express will and pleasure is, that these feasts, with others, shall be observed; and that his justices of the peace, in their several divisions, shall look to it, both that all disorders there may be prevented or punished, and that all neighbourhood and freedom, with manlike and lawful exercises, be used.”* Neighbourhood and freedom, and manlike exercises, were the old English characteristics of the wakes. At the period when William Shakspere was just entering upon life, with the natural disposition of youth, strongest perhaps in the more imaginative, to mingle in the recreations and sports of his neighbours with the most cordial spirit of enjoyment, the Puritans were beginning to denounce every assembly of the people that strove to keep up the character of merry England. Stubbes, writing at this exact epoch, says, describing "The manner of keeping of Wakesses," that “ every town, parish, and village, some at one time of the year, some at another, but so that every one keep his proper day assigned and appropriate to itself (which they call their wake-day), useth to make great preparation and provision for good cheer; to the which all their friends and kinsfolks, far and near, are invited." Such were the friendly meetings in all mirth and freedom which the proclamation of Charles calls 'neighbourhood.' The Puritans denounced them as occasions of gluttony and drunkenness. Excess, no doubt, was occasionally there. The old hospitality could scarcely exist without excess. But it must not be forgotten that, whatever might be the distinction of ranks amongst our ancestors in all matters in which "coatarmour was concerned, there was a hearty spirit of social intercourse, constituting a practical equality between man and man, which enabled all ranks to mingle without offence and without suspicion in these public ceremonials; and thus the civilization of the educated classes told upon the manners of the uneducated. There is no writer who furnishes us a more complete picture of this ancient freedom of intercourse than Chaucer. The company who meet at the Tabard, and eat the victual of the best, and drink the strong wine, and submit themselves to the merry host, and tell their tales upon the pilgrimage without the slightest restraint, are not only the very high and the very humble, but the men of professions and the men of trade, who in these latter days too often jostle and look big upon the debateable land of gentility. And so, no doubt, this freedom existed to a considerable extent even in the days of Shakspere. In the next generation, Herrick, a parish priest, writes,

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"Come, Anthea, let us two

Go to feast, as others do.

Tarts and custards, creams and cakes,

Are the junkets still at wakes:

Unto which the tribes resort,

Where the business is the sport."

With "the tribes" were mingled the stately squire, the reverend parson, and the well-fed yeoman; and, what was of more importance, their wives and daughters there exchanged smiles and courtesies. The more these meetings were frowned upon by the severe, the more would they be cherished by those who thought not that the proper destiny of man was unceasing labour and mortification. Some even of the most pure would exclaim, as Burton exclaimed after there had been a contest for fifty years upon the matter, "Let them freely feast, sing, and dance, have their

* Rushworth's "Collections," quoted in Harris's "Life of Charles I."