"THIS William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well. Now Ben Jonson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor. He began early to make Essays at Dramatic Poetry, which at that time was very low, and his plays took well." So writes honest Aubrey, in the year 1680, in his "Minutes of Lives" addressed to his "worthy friend, Mr. Anthony à Wood, Antiquary of Oxford." Of the value of Aubrey's evidence we may form some opinion from his own statement to his friend :-" "T is a task that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it; which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses in this great city, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a longævous race, by which means I have wiped

some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high." It must not be forgotten that Aubrey's account of Shakspere, brief and imperfect as it is, is the earliest known to exist. Rowe's "Life" was not published till 1707; and although he states that he must own a particular obligation to Betterton, the actor, for the most considerable part of the passages relating to this life—" his veneration for the memory of Shakspeare having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great a veneration"- we have no assistance in fixing the date of Betterton's inquiries. Betterton was born in 1635. From the Restoration until his retirement from the stage, about 1700, he was the most deservedly popular actor of his time; “such an actor," says "The Tatler," 66 as ought to be recorded with the same respect as Roscius among the Romans." He died in 1710; and looking at his busy life, it is probable that he did not make this journey into Warwickshire until after his retirement from the theatre. Had he set about these inquiries earlier, there can be little doubt that the "Life" by Rowe would have contained more precise and satisfactory information. Shakspere's sister was alive in 1646; his eldest daughter, Mrs. Hall, in 1649; his second daughter, Mrs. Quiney, in 1662; and his grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, in 1670. The information which might be collected in Warwickshire, after the death of Shakspere's lineal descendants, would necessarily be mixed up with traditions, having for the most part some foundation, but coloured and distorted by that general love of the marvellous which too often hides the fact itself in the inference from it. Thus, Shakspere's father might have sold his own meat, as the landowners of his time are reproached by Harrison for doing, and yet in no proper sense of the word have been a butcher. Thus, the supposition that the poet had intended to satirize the Lucy family, in an allusion to their arms, might have suggested that there was a grudge between him and the knight; and what so likely a subject of dispute as the killing of venison? The tradition might have been exact as to the dispute; but the laws of another century could alone have suggested that the quarrel would compel the poet to fly the country. Aubrey's story of Shakspere's coming to London is a simple and natural one, without a single marvellous circumstance about it :- "This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London.” This, the elder story, appears to us to have much greater verisimilitude than the later :- "He was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London." Aubrey, who has picked up all the gossip "of coffee-houses in this great city," hears no word of Rowe's story, which would certainly have been handed down amongst the traditions of the theatre to Davenant and Shadwell, from whom he does hear something :-"I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say, that he had a most prodigious wit." Neither does he say, nor indeed any one else till two centuries and a quarter after Shakspere is dead, that, "after four years' conjugal discord, he would resolve upon that plan of solitary emigration to the metropolis, which, at the same time that released him from the humiliation of domestic feuds, succeeded so splendidly for his worldly prosperity, and with a train of circumstances so vast for all future ages."+ It is certainly a singular vocation for a writer of genius to bury the legendary scandals of the days of Rowe, for the sake of exhuming a new scandal, which cannot be received at all without the belief that the circumstance must have had a permanent and most evil influence upon the mind of the unhappy man who thus cowardly and ignominiously is held to have severed himself from his duty as a husband and a father. We cannot trace the evil influence, and therefore we reject * This letter, which accompanies the "Lives," is dated London, June 15, 1680.

"Encyclopædia Britannica."