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who dies in 1587; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589. 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569-" Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597, which we shall notice hereafter, it is set forth that John Shakspere and his wife Mary, in the

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20th Elizabeth, 1577, mortgaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, without the honourable addition of Master, were also her children; for in 1599, when William Shakspere is an opulent man, application is made to the College of Arms, that John Shakspere, and his issue and posterity, might use a "shield of arms," impaled with the arms of Shakspere and Arden. This application (which appears also to have been made in 1596, as the grant of arms by Dethick states the fact of John Shakspere's marriage) would in all probability have been at the instance of John Shakspere's eldest son and heir. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reasonably be expected.

William Shakspere has been carried to the baptismal font in that fine old church of Stratford. The "thick-pleached alley" that leads through the churchyard to the porch is putting forth its buds and leaves. The chestnut hangs its white blossoms over the grassy mounds of that resting-place. All is joyous in the spring sunshine.

*

• It is supposed that such a green avenue was an old appendage to the church, the present trees having taken the place of more ancient ones.

Kind neighbours are smiling upon the happy father; maidens and matrons snatch a kiss of the sleeping boy. There is "a spirit of life in everything" on this 26th of April, 1564. Summer comes, but it brings not joy to Stratford. There is wailing in her streets and woe in her houses. The death-register tells a fearful history. From the 30th June to the 31st December, two hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants, a sixth of the population, are carried to the grave. The plague is in the fated town; the doors are marked with the red cross, and the terrible inscription, "Lord, have mercy upon us." It is the same epidemic which ravaged Europe in that year; which in the previous year had desolated London, and still continued there; of which sad time Stow pithily says "The poor citizens of London were this year plagued with a threefold plague, pestilence, scarcity of money, and dearth of victuals; the misery whereof were too long here to write: no doubt the poor remember it; the rich by flight into the countries made shift for themselves." Scarcity of money and dearth of victuals are the harbingers and the ministers of pestilence. Despair gathers up itself to die. Labour goes not forth to its accustomed duties. Shops are closed. The market-cross hears no hum of trade. The harvest lies almost ungathered in the fields. At last the destroying angel has gone on his way. The labourers are thinned; there is more demand for labour; "victuals" are not more abundant, but there are fewer left to share the earth's bounty. Then the adult rush into marriage. A year of pestilence is followed by a year of weddings;* and such a "strange eventful history" does the Stratford register tell. The Charnel-house-a melancholy-looking appendage to the chancel of Stratford Church, (now removed,) had then its heaps of unhonoured bones fearfully disturbed but soon the old tower heard again the wedding peal. The red

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[Stratford Church: East End, with Charuel-house.]

See Malthus on Population,' bock ii., clap. 12.

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cross was probably not on the door of John Shakspere's dwelling. Fortunately for mankind," says Malone, "it did not reach the house where the infant Shakspere lay; for not one of that name appears on the dead list. A poetical enthusiast will find no difficulty in believing that, like Horace, he reposed secure and fearless in the midst of contagion and death, protected by the Muses to whom his future life was to be devoted ::

'sacrâ

Lauroque, collatâque myrto,

Non sine diis animosus infans.'

There were more real dangers around Shakspere than could be averted by the sacred laurel and the myrtle-something more fearful than the serpent and the bear of the Roman poet. * He, by whom

"Spirits are not finely touch'd

But to fine issues,"

may be said, without offence, to have guarded this unconscious child. William Shakspere was to be an instrument, and a great one, in the intellectual advancement of mankind. The guards that He placed around that threshold of Stratford, as secondary ministers, were cleanliness, abundance, free air, parental watchfulness. The "non sine diis"-the "protected by the Muses,"-rightly considered, must mean the same guardianship. Each is a recognition of something higher than accident and mere physical laws.

The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street-houses which still exist--houses which the people of England have agreed to preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. Nine years before William Shakspere was born, his father had also purchased two copyhold tenements in Stratford-one in Greenfield Street, one in Henley Street. The copyhold house in Henley Street, purchased in 1555, was unquestionably not one of the freehold houses in the same street, purchased in 1574: yet, from Malone's loose way of stating that in 1555 the lease of a House in Henley Street was assigned to John Shakspere, it has been conjectured that he purchased in 1574 the house he had occupied for many years. As he purchased two houses in 1555 in different parts of the town, it is not likely that he occupied both; he might not have occupied either. Before he purchased the two houses in Henley Street, in 1574, he occupied fourteen acres of meadow-land, with appurtenances, at a very high rent; the property is called Ingon meadow in "the Close Rolls." Dugdale calls the place where it was situated "Inge;" saying that it was a member of the manor of Old Stratford, and "signifyeth in our old English a meadow or low ground, the name well agreeing with its situation." It is about a mile and a quarter from the town of Stratford, on the road to Warwick. William Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copyhold houses, in Greenhill Street, or in Henley Street; he might have been born at Ingon; or his father might have occupied one of the two freehold

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