And thereon will I chiefly meditate,

And hold no other sect but such devotion.

Wilt thou not look? is all thy love o'erwhelmed?

Wilt thou not hear? what malice stops thy cars?

Why speak'st thou not? what silence tics thy tongue?
Thou hast been sighted as the eagle is,

And heard as quickly as the fearful hare,
And spoke as smoothly as an orator,

When I have bid thee hear, or sec, or speak:
And art thou sensible in none of these?
Weigh all thy good turns with this little fault,
And I deserve not Mosbie's muddy looks.
A fence of trouble is not thickened still;
Be clear again; I'll ne'er more trouble thee.
Mos. O fie, no; I'm a basc artificer;
My wings are feathered for a lowly flight.
Mosbie, fie, no; not for a thousand pound
Make love to you; why. 'tis unpardonable.
We beggars must not breathe where gentles are.
AL. Sweet Mosbie is as gentle as a king,
And I too blind to judge him otherwise.
Flowers sometimes spring in fallow lands,
Weeds in gardens, roses grow on thorns;
So whatsoe'er my Mosbie's father was,
Himself is valued gently by his worth.

Mos. Ah, how you women can insinuate,
And clear a trespass with your sweet set tongue.
I will forget this quarrel, gentle Alice,
Provided I'll be tempted so no more.

'Arden of Feversham' was first printed in 1592. The Yorkshire Tragedy,' another play of the same kind, but apparently more hastily written, was performed in 1604, and four years afterwards printed with Shakspeare's name. Both Dyce and Collier, able dramatic antiquaries and students, are inclined to the opinion that this drama contains passages which only Shakspeare could have written. But in lines like the following--though smooth and natural, and quoted as the most Shaksperian in the play-we miss the music of the great dramatist's thoughts and numbers. It is, however, a forcible picture ́ of a luckless, reckless gambler:

Picture of a Gambler.

What will become of us!

All will away!
My husband never ceases in expense,
Both to consume his credit and his house;
And 'tis set down by Heaven's just decrce,
That Riot's child must needs be Beggary.
Are these the virtues that his youth did promise?
Dice and voluptuous meetings, midnight revels,
Taking his bed with surfeits, ill beseeming
The ancient honour of his house and name?
And this not all, but that which kills me most,
When he recounts his losses and false fortunes,
The weakness of his state, so much dejected,
Not as a man repentant, but half mad.
His fortunes cannot answer his expense.
He sits and sullenly locks up his arms,

Forgetting Heaven, looks downward, which makes him
Appear so dreadful, that he frights my heart;
Walks heavily, as if his soul were earth;
Not penitent for those his sins are past,
But vexed his money cannot make them last

A fearful melancholy, ungodly sorrow!

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

We have seen that Greene, Peele, and Marlowe prepared in some degree the way for Shakspeare. They had given a more settled and scholastic form to the drama, and assigned it a permanent place in the national literature. They adorned the stage with more variety of character and action, with deep passion, and true poetry. The latter, indeed, was tinged with incoherence and extravagance, but the sterling ore of genius was, in Marlowe at least, abundant. Above all, they had familiarised the public ear to the use of blank verse. The last improvement was the greatest; for even the genius of Shakspeare would have been cramped and confined, if it had been condemned to move only in the fetters of rhyme. The quick interchange of dialogue, and the various nice shades and alternations of character and feeling, could not have been evolved in dramatic action, except in that admirable form of verse which unites rhy.hmical harmony with the utmost freedom, grace and flexibility. When Shakspeare, therefore, appeared conspicuously on the horizon, the scene may be said to have been prepared for his reception. The Genius of the Drama had accumulated materials for the use of the great poet, who was to extend her empire over limits not yet recognised, and invest it with a splendour which the world had never seen before.

The few incidents known of Shakspeare's life are chiefly derived from legal documents. The fond idolatry with which he is now regarded was only turned to his personal history at a late period, when little could be gathered even by the most enthusiastic collector. WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, in April 1564. There is a pleasant and poetical tradition, that he was born on the 23d of the month, the anniversary of St. George, the tutelar saint of England; but all we know with certainty is, that he was baptised on the 26th. His father, John Shakspeare, is traced to a family occupying land at Snitterfield, near Warwick. He settled in the town of Stratford, became a woolcomber or glover, and elevated his social position by marriage with a rustic heiress, Mary Arden, possessed of an estate worth about £120 per annum of our present money. The poet's father rose to be highbailiff and chief alderman of Stratford; but in 1578, he is found mortgaging his wife's inheritance, and, from entries in the townbooks, is supposed to have fallen into comparative poverty. William was the eldest of six surviving children, and after some education at the grammar-school, he is said to have been brought home to assist at

his father's business. There is a blank in his history for some years; but doubtless he was engaged, whatever might be his circumstances or employment, in treasuring up materials for his future poetry. The study of man and of nature, facts in natural history, the country, the fields, and the woods, would be gleaned by familiar intercourse and observation among his fellow-townsmen, and in rambling over the beautiful valley of the Avon. It has been conjectured that he was some time in a lawyer's office, as his works abound in technical legal phrases and illustrations. This has always seemed to us highly probable. The London players were also then in the habit of visiting Stratford; Thomas Green, an actor, was.a native of the town; and Burbage, the greatest performer of his day-the future Richard, Hamlet, and Othello-was originally from Warwickshire. Who can doubt, then, that the high-bailiff's son, from the years of twelve to twenty, was a frequent and welcome visitant behind the scenes-that he there imbibed the tastes and feelings which coloured all his future life-and that he there felt the first stirrings of his immortal dramatic genius. We are persuaded that he had begun to write long before he left Stratford, and had most probably sketched, if not completed, his 'Venus and Adonis,' and the 'Lucrece.' The amount of his education at the grammar-school has been made a question of eager scrutiny and controversy. Ben Jonson says he had little Latin, and less Greek.' This is not denying that he had some. Many Latinised idioms and expressions are to be found in his plays. The choice of two classical subjects for his carly poetry, and the numerous felicitous allusions in his dramas to the mythology of the ancients, shrew that he was imbued with the spirit and taste of classical literature, and was a happy student, if not a critical scholar. His mind was too comprehensive to degenerate into pedantry; but when, at the age of four or five and twenty, he took the neld of original dramatic composition, in company with the university-bred authors and wits of his times, he soon distanced them all, in correctness as well as facility, in the intellectual richness of his thoughts and diction, and in the wide range of his acquired knowledge. It may be safely assumed, therefore, that at Stratford he was a hard, though perhaps an irregular student. The precocious maturity of Shakspeare's passions hurried him into a premature marriage. On the 28th of November 1582, he obtained a licence at Worcester, legalising his union with Anne Hathaway, with once asking of the bans. Two of his neighbours became security in the sum of £40, that the poet would fulfil his matrimonial engagement, he being a minor, and unable, legally, to contract for himself. Anne Hathaway was seven years older than her husband. She was the daughter of a 'substantial yeoman' of the village of Shottery, about a mile from Stratford The poet's daughter, Susanna, was christened on the 26th of May 1583, six months after the marriage. In a year and a half twe other children, twins, were born to Shakspeare, who had no family afterwards. We may readily sup

pose that the small town of Stratford did not offer scope for the ambition of the poet, now arrived at early manhood, and feeling the ties of a husband and a father. He removed to London in 1586 or 1587. It has been said that his departure was hastened by the effects of a lampoon he had written on a neighbouring squire, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, in revenge for Sir Thomas prosecuting him for deerstealing. The story is inconsistent in its details. Part of it must be untrue; it was never recorded against him in his lifetime; and the whole may have been built upon the opening scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor'—not written till after Sir Thomas Lucy's death-in which there is some wanton wit on the armorial bearings of the Lucy family.* As an actor, Shakspeare is spoken favourably of by Lodge; and in 1603, when a new patent was granted to the Blackfriars Company by King James, the poet's name appears second in the list; but the source of his unexampled success was his immortal dramas, the delight and wonder of his age

That so did take Eliza and our James,

as Ben Jonson has recorded, and as is confirmed by many authorities. Up to 1811, the whole of Shakspeare's plays-thirty-seven in number, according to the first folio edition—are supposed to have been produced. With the nobles, the wits, and poets of his day, he was in familiar intercourse. The gentle Shakspeare,' as he was usually styled, was throned in all hearts. But notwithstanding his brilliant success in the metropolis, the poet early looked forward to a permanent retirement to the country. He visited Stratford once a year; and when wealth flowed in upon him, he purchased property in his native town and its vicinity. In 1597, he paid £60 for New Place,

* Mr. Washington Irving, in his Sketch-book, thus adverts to Charlecote and the deerstealing affair:

I had a desire to see the old family seat of the Lucys at Charlecote, and to ramble through the park where Shakspeare, in company with some of the roysters of Stratford, committed his youthful offence of deer-stealing. In this hare-brained exploit, we are told that he was taken prisoner, and carried to the keeper's lodge, where he remained all night in doleful captivity. When brought into the presence of Sir Thomas Lucy, his treatment must have been galling and humiliating; for it so wrought upon his spirit, as to produce a rough pasquinade, which was affixed to the park-gate at Charlecote.

This flagitious attack upon the dignity of the knight so incensed him, that he applied to a lawyer at Warwick to put the severity of the laws in force against the rhyming deer-stalker. Shakspeare did not wait to brave the united puissance of a knight of the shire and a country attorney..

I now found myself among the noble avenues of oaks and elms, whose vast size bespoke the growth of centuries It was from wandering in early life among this rich scenery, and about the romantic solitudes of the adjoining park of Fulbroke, which then formed a part of the Lucy estate, that some of Shakspeare's commentators have supposed he derived his noble forest meditations of Jaques, and the enchanting woodland pictures in As You Like It. [The house] is a large building of brick, with stone quoins, and is in the Gothic style of Queen Elizabeth's day, having been built in the first year of her reign. The exterior remains very nearly in its original state, and may be considered a fair specimen of the residence of a wealthy country gentleman of those days. The front of the house is completely in the old style-with stone-shafted casements, a great bow-window of heavy stone- work, and a portal with armorial bearings over it, carved in The Avon, which winds through the park, makes a bend just at the foot of a gently sloping bank which sweeps round the rear of the house. Large herds of deer were reposing upon its borders'

stone.

the principal house in Stratford; in 1602, he gave £320 for 107 acres of land adjoining to his purchase; and in 1605, he paid £440 for the lease of the tithes of Stratford. The produce of his lands he no doubt disposed of like the ordinary lords of the soil, and Mr. Halliwell, in his life of Shakspeare (1848), shews that in 1604 the poet brought an action against Philip Rogers for £1, 15s. 10d. for malt sold and delivered to him. The latest entry of his name among the king's players is in 1604, but he was living in London in 1609. The year 1612 has been assigned as the date of his final retirement to the country. In the fulness of his fame, with a handsome competency, and before age had chilled the enjoyment of life, the poet returned to his native town, to spend the remainder of his days among the quiet scenes and the friends of his youth. His parents were both dead, but their declining years had been gladdened by the prosperity of their illustrious son. His family appears to have had a leaning towards the Puritans, and in the town-chamberlain's accounts for 1614, there is a record of a present of sack and claret, given to a preacher at New Place.' Preachers of all sects, if good men, would be welcome to the poet's hospitality! Four years were spent by Shakspeare in this dignified retirement, and the history of literature scarcely presents another such picture of calm felicity and satisfied ambition. He died on the 23d of April, 1616, having just completed his fifty-second year. His widow survived him seven years. His two daughters were both married-his only son Hamnet had died in 1596—and one of them had three sons; but all these died without issue, and there now remains no lineal representative of the great poet.

་

Of the recent Shakspearian researches, we must say with regret, in the words of Mr. Hallam, no letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, has been produced.' The Calendars of the State Papers,' published under the authority of the Master of the Rolls, shew that in the list of trained soldiers of the hundred of Barlichway, in Warwickshire, in September 1605, was a William Shakspeare* The militia bands were at that time-the agitated year of the Gunpowder Plot-formed in order to repress an expected rising in the midland shires, and as the poet was then a considerable landholder in his native county, he may have been enrolled as one of its military defenders. To know positively that the gentle Shakspeare' had borne arms, and, like Ben Jonson, shouldered a pike,' as one of the Warwickshire public force, would be a curious and suggestive fact in his personal history. In June 1858, an autograph signature of the poet to a mortgage deed of a house in Blackfriars, dated March 11, 1612-13, was sold in London to the curators of the British Museum for three

See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I. 1603 to 1610, preserved in the State Paper Department of H. M.'s Public Record Office. Edited by Mary Anne Everett Green (1857). The publication of these calendars will be invaluable to future historians and biographers.