enriched his garden at New Place with one of these exotic, and at that time, very rare trees. This plant of his hand took root, and flourished till the year 1752, when it was destroyed by the barbarous axe of one Francis Gastrell, a clergyman, into whose worse than Gothic hands New Place had most unfortunately fallen. As we are not told the precise time, when Shakspeare retired from the stage and the metropolis to enjoy the tranquillity of life in his native town, we cannot pretend to determine it. As he is said, however, to have passed some years in his establishment at New Place, we may conclude that his removal took place either in 1612 or in 1613, when he was yet in the vigour of life, being not more than forty-eight or forty-nine years old. He had ceased, as it is probable, to tread the stage as an actor at an earlier period; for in the list of actors, prefixed to the Volpone of B. Jonson, performed at the Globe theatre, and published in 1605, the name of W. Shakspeare is not to be found. However versed he might be in the science of acting, (and that he was versed in it we are assured by his directions to the players in Hamlet) and, however well he might acquit himself in some of the subordinate characters of the drama, it does not appear that he ever rose to the higher honours of his profession. But if they were above his attainment, they seem not to have been the objects of his ambition; for by one of his sonnets we find that he lamented the fortune which had devoted him to the stage, and that he considered himself as degraded by such a public exhibition. The time was not yet come when actors were to be the companions of princes: when their lives, as of illustrious men, were to be written; and when statues were to be erected to them by public contribution! The amount of the fortune, on which Shakspeare retired from the busy world, has been the subject of some discussion. By Gildon, who forbears to state his authority, this fortune is valued at 300l. a year; and by Malone, who, calculating our Poet's real property from authentic documents, assigns a random value to his * See Sonnet cxi. personal, it is reduced to 2007. Of these two valuations of Shakspeare's property, we conceive that Gildon's approaches the more nearly to the truth: for if to Malone's conjectural estimate of the personal property, of which he professes to be wholly ignorant, be added the thousand pounds, given by Southampton, (an act of munificence of which we entertain not a doubt) the precise total, as money then bore an interest of 107. per cent., of the three hundred pounds a year will be made up. On the smallest of these incomes, however, when money was at least of five times its present value, might our Poet possess the comforts and the liberalities of life: and in the society of his family, and of the neighbouring gentry, conciliated by the amiableness of his manners and the pleasantness of his conversation, he seems- to have passed his few remaining days in the enjoyment of tranquillity and respect. So exquisite, indeed, appears to have been his relish of the quiet, which was his portion within the walls of New Place, that it induced a complete oblivion of all that had engaged his attention, and had aggrandized his name in the preceding scenes of his life. Without any regard to his literary fame, either present or to come, he saw with perfect unconcern some of his immortal works brought, mutilated and deformed, in surreptitious copies, before the world; others of them, with an equal indifference to their fate, he permitted to remain in their unrevised or interpolated MSS. in the hands of the theatric prompter. There is not, probably, in the whole compass of literary history, such another instance of a proud superiority to what has been called by a rival genius, "The last infirmity of noble minds," and as that which was now exhibited by our illustrious dramatist and poet. He seemed "As if he could not or he would not find, How much his worth transcended all his kind *.” . With a privilege, rarely indulged even to the sons of * Epitaph on a Fair Maiden Lady, by Dryden. genius, he had produced his admirable works without any throes or labour of the mind: they had obtained for him all that he had asked from them,-the patronage of the great, the applause of the witty, and a competency of fortune adequate to the moderation of his desires. Having fulfilled or, possibly, exceeded his expectations, they had discharged their duty; and he threw them altogether from his thought; and whether it were their destiny to emerge into renown, or to perish in the drawer of a manager; to be brought to light in a state of integrity, or to revisit the glimpses of the moon with a thousand mortal murders on their head, engaged no part of his solicitude or interest. They had given to him the means of easy life, and he sought from them nothing more. This insensibility in our Author to the offspring of his brain may be the subject of our wonder or admiration: but its consequences have been calamitous to those who in after times have hung with delight over his pages. On the intellect and the temper of these ill-fated mortals it has inflicted a heavy load of punishment in the dulness and the arrogance of commentators and illustratorsin the conceit and petulance of Theobald; the imbecillity of Capell; the pert and tasteless dogmatism of Steevens; the ponderous littleness of Malone and of Drake. Some superior men, it is true, have enlisted themselves in the cause of Shakspeare. Rowe, Pope, Warburton, Hanmer, and Johnson have successively been his editors; and have professed to give his scenes in their original purity to the world. But from some cause or other, which it is not our present business to explore, each of these editors, in his turn, has disappointed the just expectations of the public; and, with an inversion of Nature's general rule, the little men have finally prevailed against the great. The blockheads have hooted the wits from the field; and, attaching themselves to the mighty body of Shakspeare, like barnacles to the hull of a proud man of war, they are prepared to plough with him the vast ocean of time; and thus, by the only means in their power, to snatch themselves from that oblivion to which Nature had de voted them. It would be unjust, however, to defraud these gentlemen of their proper praise. They have read for men of talents; and, by their gross labour in the mine, they have accumulated materials to be arranged› and polished by the hand of the finer artist. Some apology may be necessary for this short digression from the more immediate subject of my biography. But the three or four years, which were passed by Shakspeare in the peaceful retirement of New Place are not distinguished by any traditionary anecdote deserving of our record; and the chasm may not improperly be supplied with whatever stands in contiguity with it. I should pass in silence, as too trifling for notice, the story of our Poet's extempore and jocular epitaph on John Combe, a rich townsman of Stratford, and a noted money-lender, if my readers would not object to me that I had omitted an anecdote which had been honoured with a place in every preceding biography of my author. As the circumstance is related by Rowe, "In a pleasant conversation among their common friends, Mr. Combe told Shakspeare, in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph if he happened to outlive him; and, since he could not know what might be said of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately upon which Shakspeare gave him these four verses: Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved : Ho! Ho! quoth the devil, 'tis my John a Combe. But the sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so severely that he never forgave it." By Aubrey the story is differently told; and the lines in question, with some alterations, which evidently make them worse, are said to have been written after Combe's death. Steevens and Malone discredit the whole tale. The two first lines, as given to us by Rowe, are unquestionably not Shakspeare's; and that any lasting enmity subsisted between these two burghers of Stratford is disproved by the respective wills of the parties, John Combe bequeathing five pounds to our Poet, and our Poet leaving his sword to John Combe's nephew and residuary legatee, John Combe himself being at that time deceased. With the two commentators abovementioned, I am inclined, therefore, on the whole, to reject the story as a fabrication; though I cannot, with Steevens, convict the lines of malignity; or think, with him and with Malone, that the character of Shakspeare, on the supposition of his being their author, could require any laboured vindication to clear it from stain. In the anecdote, as related by Rowe, I can see nothing but a whimsical sally, breaking from the mind of one friend, and of a nature to excite a good-humoured smile on the cheek of the other. In Aubrey's hands, the transaction assumes a somewhat darker complexion; and the worse verses, as written after the death of their subject, may justly be branded as malevolent, and as discovering enmity in the heart of their writer. But I have dwelt too long upon a topic which, in truth, is undeserving of a syllable; and if I were to linger on it any longer, for the purpose of exhibiting Malone's reasons for his preference of Aubrey's copy of the epitaph to Rowe's, and his discovery of the propriety and beauty of the single Ho in the last line of Aubrey's, as Ho is the abbreviation of Hobgoblin, one of the names of Robin Good-fellow, the fairy servant of Oberon, my readers would have just cause to complain of me as sporting with their time and their patience. On the 9th of July 1614, Stratford was ravaged by a fire, which destroyed fifty-four dwelling-houses besides barns and out-offices. It abstained, however, from the property of Shakspeare; and he had only to commiserate the losses of his neighbours. With his various powers of pleasing; his wit and his humour; the gentleness of his manners; the flow of his spirits and his fancy; the variety of anecdote with which his mind must have been stored; his knowledge of the world, and his intimacy with man, in every gradation of the society, from the prompter of a playhouse to the |