There were fearful pictures, too, of the last Judgment; with the Seven Deadly Sins visibly portrayed,-the punishments of the evil, the rewards of the just. Surrounded as he was with the memorials of the old religion-with great changes on every side, but still very recent changes-how impossible was it that Shakspere should not have been thoroughly imbued with a knowledge of all that pertained to the faith of his ancestors! One of the most philosophical writers of our day has said that Catholicism gave us Shakspere. Not so, entirely. Shakspere belonged to the transition period, or he could not have been quite what he was. His intellect was not the dwarfish and precocious growth of the hot-bed of change, and still less of convulsion. His whole soul was permeated with the ancient vitalities-the things which the changes of institutions could not touch; but it could bourgeon under the new influences, and blend the past and the present, as the "giant oak" of five hundred winters is covered with the foliage of one spring.†

• Carlyle French Revolution.'

The foundation scholars of this grammar-school at present receive a complete classical education, so as to fit them for the university.—(Report of Commissioners.)

NOTE ON JOHN SHAKSPERE'S CONFESSION OF FAITH.

THE thirteenth item of this strange production appears to us, in common with many other passages, to be conceived in that spirit of exaggeration which would mark the work of an imitator of the language of the sixteenth century, rather than the production of one habitually employing it :"Item, I, John Shakspear, do by this my last will and testament bequeath my soul, as soon as it shall be delivered and loosened from the prison of this my body, to be entombed in the sweet and amorous coffin of the side of Jesus Christ; and that in this life-giving sepulchre it may rest and live, perpetually enclosed in that eternal habitation of repose, there to bless for ever and ever that direful iron of the lance, which, like a charge in a censer, forms so sweet and pleasant a monument within the sacred breast of my Lord and Saviour." Surely this raving is not the language of a man in earnest. Who then, can it be imagined, would fabricate this production in 1770? Mosely the bricklayer finds it in the roof of the house in which Shakspere was held to be born; and to whom, according to the story, does he give it? Not to the descendant of John Shakspere, the then owner of the house, but to Alderman Peyton, who transmits it to Malone through the Vicar of Stratford. Garrick's jubilee took place in 1769; but the farces enacted on that occasion were not likely to set people searching after antiquities or fabricating them. But previous to the publication of his edition of Shakspere, in 1790, Malone visited Stratford to examine the Registers and other documents. He appears to have done exactly what he pleased on this occasion. He carried off the Registers and the Corporation Records with him to London; and he whitewashed the bust of Shakspere, so as utterly to destroy its value as a memorial of costume. There was then a cunning fellow in the town, by name Jordan, who thought the commentator a fair mark for his ingenuity. He produced to him a drawing of Shakspere's house, New Place, copied, as he said, from an ancient document, which Malone engraved as "From a Drawing in the Margin of an Ancient Survey, made by order of Sir George Carew, and found at Clopton, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1786." When the elder Ireland visited Stratford in 1795 the original drawing was "lost or destroyed." The same edition of Shakspere in which this drawing "found at Clopton" is first presented to the world also first gives the Confession of Faith of John Shakspere, found in the roof of his house in Henley Street. We doubt exceedingly whether Jordan fabricated the one or the other: but there was a man who was quite capable of prompting both impositions, and of carrying them through; one upon whom the suspicion of fabricating Shaksperian documents strongly rested in his lifetime; one who would have rejoiced with the most malignant satisfaction in hoaxing a rival editor. We need not name him. It is evident to us that Malone subsequently discovered that he had been imposed upon : for in his posthumous Life of Shakspeare' he has not one word of allusion to this Confession of Faith; he not only omits to print it, but he suppresses all notice of it. He would sink it for ever in the sea of oblivion. In 1790 he produced it triumphantly with the conviction that it was genuine; in 1796 he had obtained documents to prove that it could not have been the composition of any one of the poet's family; but in the posthumous edition of 1821 the documents of explanation, as well as the Confession of Faith itself, are treated as if they never had been.

LET us pass over for a time the young Shakspere at his school-desk, inquiring not when he went from The Short Dictionary' forward to the use of 'Cooper's Lexicon,' or whether he was most drilled in the Eclogues' of Virgil, or those of the "good old Mantuan." Of one thing we may be well assured, that the instruction of the grammar-school was the right instruction for the most vivacious mind, as for him of slower capacity. To spend a considerable portion of the years of boyhood in the acquirement of Latin and Greek was not to waste them, as modern illumination would instruct us. Something was to be acquired, accurately and completely, that was of universal application, and within the boy's power of acquirement. The particular knowledge that would fit him for a chosen course of life would be an after acquirement; and, having attained the habit of patient study, and established in his own mind a standard to apply to all branches of knowledge by knowing one branch well, he would enter upon the race of life without being over-weighted with the elements of many arts and sciences, which it belongs only to the mature intellect to bear easily and grace

fully, and to employ to lasting profit. Our grammar-schools were wise institutions. They opened the road to usefulness and honour to the humblest in the land; they bestowed upon the son of the peasant the same advantages of education as the son of the noble could receive from the most accomplished teacher in his father's halls. Long may they be preserved amongst us in their integrity; not converted by the meddlings of innovation into lecture-rooms for cramming children with the nomenclature of every science; presenting little idea even of the physical world beyond that of its being a vast aggregation of objects that may be classified and catalogued; and leaving the spiritual world utterly uncared for, as a region whose products cannot be readily estimated by a money

value!

Every schoolboy's dwelling-place is a microcosm; but the little world lying around William Shakspere was something larger than that in which boys of our own time for the most part live. The division of employments had not so completely separated a town life from a country life as with us; and even the town occupations, the town amusements, and the town wonders, had more variety in them than our own days of systematic arrangement can present. Much of the education of William Shakspere was unquestionably in the fields. A thousand incidental allusions manifest his familiarity with all the external aspects of nature. He is very rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers,―reflections of his own native scenery,-spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. The sports, the festivals, of the lone farm or the secluded hamlet are presented by him with all the charms of an Arcadian age, but with a truthfulness that is not found in Arcadia. The nicest peculiarities in the habits of the lower creation are given at a touch; we see the rook wing his evening flight to the wood; we hear the drowsy hum of the sharded beetle. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener's art can be expounded by him. All this he appears to do as if from an instinctive power. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the "green lap" in which the boypoet was "laid." The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. Looking on its placid stream, its gently swelling hills, its rich pastures, its sleeping woodlands, the external world would to him be full of images of repose it was in the heart of man that he was to seek for the sublime. Nature has thus ever with him something genial and exhilarating. There are storms in his great dramas, but they are the accompaniments of the more terrible storms of human passions: they are raised by the poet's art to make the agony of Lear more intense, and the murder of Duncan more awful. But his love of a smiling creation seems ever present. We must image Stratford as it was, to see how the young Shakspere walked "in glory and in joy" amongst his native fields. Upon

the bank of the Avon, having a very slight rise, is placed a scattered town; a town whose dwellings have orchards and gardens, with lofty trees growing in its pathways. Its splendid collegiate church, in the time of Henry VIII., was described to lie half a mile from the town. Its eastern window is reflected in the river which flows beneath; its grey tower is embowered amidst lofty elm-rows. At the opposite end of the town is a fine old bridge, with a causeway whose "wearisome but needful length" tells of inundations in the low pastures that lie all around it. We look upon Dugdale's Map of Barichway Hundred, in which Stratford is situated, published in 1656, and we see four roads issuing from the town. The one to Henley in Arden, which lies through the street in which Shakspere may be supposed to have passed his boyhood, continues over a valley of some breadth and extent, unenclosed fields undoubtedly in the sixteenth century, with the hamlets of Shottery and Bishopton amidst them. The road leads into the then woody district of Arden. At a short distance from it is the hamlet of Wilmecote, where Mary Arden dwelt; and some two miles aside, more in the heart of the woodland district, and hard by the river Alne, is the village of Aston Cantlow. Another road indicated on this old map is that to Warwick. The wooded hills of Welcombe overhang it, and a little aside, some mile and a half from Stratford, is the meadow of Ingon which John Shakspere rented in 1570. Very beautiful, even now, is this part of the neighbourhood, with its rapid undulations, little dells which shut in the scattered sheep, and sudden hills opening upon a wide landscape. Ancient crab-trees and hawthorns tell of uncultivated downs which have rung to the call of the falconer or the horn of the huntsman; and then, having crossed the ridge, we are amongst rich corn-lands, with farm-houses of no modern date scattered about; and deep in the hollow, so as to be hidden till we are upon it, the old village of Snitterfield, with its ancient church and its yew-tree as ancient. Here the poet's maternal grandmother had her jointure; and here it has been conjectured his father also had possessions. On the opposite side of Stratford the third road runs in the direction of the Avon to the village of Bidford, with a nearer pathway along the river-bank. We cross the ancient bridge by the fourth road (which also diverges to Shipston), and we are on our way to the celebrated house and estate of Charlcote, the ancient seat of the Lucys, the Shaksperian locality with which most persons are familiar through traditions of deer-stealing, of which we have not yet to speak. A pleasant ramble indeed is this to Charlcote and Hampton Lucy, even with glimpses of the Avon from a turnpike-road. But let the road run through meadows without hedgerows, with pathways following the river's bank, now diverging when the mill is close upon the stream, now crossing a leafy elevation, and then suddenly dropping under a precipitous wooded rock, and we have a walk such as poet might covet, and such as Shakspere did enjoy in his boy rambles.

Through these pleasant places would the boy William Shakspere walk hand in hand with his father, or wander at his own free will with his school companions. All the simple processes of farming life would be familiar to him. The profitable mysteries of modern agriculture would not embarrass his youthful experience. He would witness none of that anxious diligence which compels the