stood." The cutting down of the mulberry-tree seems to have been regarded as a great offence in Mr. Gastrell's own generation. His wife was a sister of Johnson's correspondent, Mrs. Aston. After the death of Mr. Gastrell, his widow resided at Lichfield; and in 1776, Boswell, in company with Johnson, dined with the sisters. Boswell on this occasion says-" I was not informed, till afterwards, that Mrs. Gastrell's husband was the clergyman who, while he lived at Stratfordupon-Avon, with Gothic barbarity cut down Shakspeare's mulberry-tree, and, as Dr. Johnson told me, did it to vex his neighbours. His lady, I have reason to believe on the same authority, participated in the guilt of what the enthusiasts of our immortal bard deem almost a species of sacrilege." The mulberry-tree was cut down in 1756; was sold for firewood; and the bulk of it was purchased by a Mr. Thomas Sharp, of Stratford-upon-Avon, clock and watch maker, who made at solemn affidavit, some years afterwards, that out of a sincere veneration for the memory of its celebrated planter he had the greater part of it conveyed to his own premises, and worked it into curious toys and useful articles. The destruction of the mulberry-tree, which the previous possessor of New Place used to show with pride and veneration, enraged the people of Stratford; and Mr. Wheler tells us that he remembers to have heard his father say that, when a boy, he assisted in the revenge of breaking the reverend destroyer's windows. The hostilities were put an end to by the Rev. Mr. Gastrell quitting Stratford in 1757; and, upon the principle of doing what he liked with his own, pulling the house to the ground.

We may charitably believe, not only that this reverend person had no enthusiastic reverence for the spot hallowed by associations with the memory of Shakspere; but that he thought nothing of Shakspere in the whole course of his proceedings. He bought a house, and paid for it. He wished to enjoy it in quiet. People with whom he could not sympathise intruded upon him. to see the gardens and the house. In the gardens was a noble mulberry-tree. Tradition said it was planted by Shakspere; and the professional enthusiasts of Shakspere, the Garricks and the Macklins, had sat under its shade, during the occupation of one who felt that there was a real honour in the ownership of such a place. The Rev. Mr. Gastrell wanted the house and the gardens to himself. He had that strong notion of the exclusive rights of property which belongs to most Englishmen, and especially to ignorant Englishmen. Mr. Gastrell was an ignorant man, though a clergyman. We have seen his diary, written upon a visit to Scotland three years after the pulling down of New Place. His journey was connected with some electioneering intrigues in the Scotch boroughs. He is a stranger in Scotland, and he goes into some of its most romantic districts. The scenery makes no impression upon him, as may be imagined; but he is scandalized beyond measure when he meets with a bad dinner, and a rough lodging. He has just literature enough to know the name of Shakspere; but in passing through Forres and Glamis he has not the slightest association with Shakspere's Macbeth. A Captain Gordon informs his vacant mind upon some abstruse subjects, as to which we have the following record:-" He assures me that the Duncan murdered at Forres was the same person that Shakspeare writes of." There scarcely requires any further

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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,"

of

we hold, upon the same principle, that the man who speaks in this literal way 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

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 :—

John hall youthma & Enfarma &qupper

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.

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.

Folall

[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.

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 associations 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

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