in Measure for Measure, and All's Well that Ends Well, which are handled with a due regard to decency, must be set aside for their impropriety.

Had no other monument of the age of Elizabeth come down to us than the works of Shakspeare, I should, from them alone, have formed the most advantageous idea of its state of social cultivation. Those who look through such strange spectacles as to find nothing in them but rudeness and barbarity, when they cannot deny what I have just now advanced, have no other resource for themselves but to say, "What has Shakspeare to do with the cultivation of his age? He had no share in it. Born in a low situation, ignorant and uneducated, he passed his life in low society, and laboured for bread to please a vulgar audience, without ever dreaming of fame or posterity."

In all this there is not a single word of truth, though it has been repeated a thousand times. We know, it is true, very little of the life of the poet; and what we do know, for the most part, consists of raked up anecdotes of a very suspicious nature, nearly of such a description as those which are told at inns to inquisitive strangers, who wish to know something of a celebrated man in the place where he lives. The first actual document which enabled us to have a peep into his family concerns was the discovery of his will. It betrayed an extraordinary deficiency of critical acumen in the commentators of Shakspeare, that none of them, as far as we know, have ever thought of availing them

selves of his sonnets for tracing the circumstances of his life. These sonnets paint most unequivocally the actual situation and sentiments of the poet; they enable us to become acquainted with the passions of the man; they even contain the most remarkable confessions of his youthful errors. Shakspeare's father was a man of property; and in a diploma from the Herald's Office, for the renewal or confirmation of his coat of arms, he is styled Gentleman. Our poet, the oldest of four' children, could not, it is true, receive an academical education, as he married when hardly eighteen, probably in consequence of family arrangements. In this private way of life he continued but a very few years; and he was either enticed to London from the wearisomeness of his situation, or banished from home, as it is said, in consequence of his

j I beg leave, in this place, to refer to a former note on these sonnets, and to add that the reader who wishes for an ampler consideration of their merits, and of their applicability towards explaining some material circumstances of the life of Shakspeare, may consult my " Shakspeare and his Times," vol. ii. p. 50. ad p. 82.

k

* Up to the period of 1574, Shakspeare's father might be considered as a man of property, being possessed of two houses and some land, beside personal property; but he shortly afterwards fell into a state of poverty, and describes himself in 1597, four years before his death, as of " very small wealth and very few friends."

This is a mistake, for John Shakspeare had eight children: Jone, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Jone, Ann, Richard, and Edmund. Of these, Jone, the first-born, died very early after birth, and Margaret when five months old.

irregularities. He there resorted to the situation of player, which he considered at first as a degradation, principally because he was seduced by the example of his comrades to participate in their wild and irregular manner of life.* It is extremely probable that, by the poetical fame which he acquired in the progress of his career, he was the principal means of ennobling the stage, and bringing the situation of a player into better repute. Even at a very early age he endeavoured to distinguish himself as a poet in other walks than those of the stage, as is proved by his juvenile poems of Adonis and Lucrece. He afterwards obtained the situation of joint proprietor and manager of the theatre for which he laboured. That he was not admitted to the society of persons of distinction is altogether incredible; besides many others, he found in the Earl of Southampton, the friend of the unfortunate Essex, a most liberal and kind patron. His pieces were not merely the delight of the million, but in great favor at court: the two monarchs under whose reigns he wrote, were, according to the testimony of a contemporary, alto

* In one of his sonnets he says:—

O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,

That did not better for my life provide,

Than public means whic public manners breeds.

And in the following:

Your love and pity doth the impression fill,
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow.

gether taken with him.* They were acted at court; and Elizabeth appears herself to have given occasion to the writing of more than one of them, for the celebration of her court festivals. It is known that King James honoured Shakspeare so far as to write to him with his own hand. All this looks very unlike either contempt or banishment into the obscurity of a low circle. Shakspeare acquired, by his activity as a poet, player, and stage-manager, a considerable property, which he enjoyed in his native spot, in retirement and in the society of a beloved daughter, in the last years of his too short life. Immediately after his death, a monument was erected over his grave, which may be considered sumptuous for those times.

Amidst such brilliant success, and with such distinguished proofs of respect and honour from his contemporaries, it would be singular indeed if Shakspeare, notwithstanding the modesty of a great mind, which he certainly possessed in a peculiar degree, should never have dreamed of posthumous fame. As a profound thinker, he had pretty accurately taken the measure of the circle of human capabilities, and he could say to himself with confidence, that many of his productions would not easily be surpassed. What foundation then is there for the contrary assertion, which would degrade the immortal ast to the situation of a daily

* Ben Jonson :

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!

labourer for a rude multitude? Merely this, that he himself published no edition of his whole works. We do not reflect that a poet, always accustomed to labour immediately for the stage, who has often enjoyed the triumph of overpowering assembled crowds of spectators, and drawing from them the most tumultuous applause, who is not dependent on the caprice of vitiated stage directors, but left to his own discretion in the selection of a proper mode of theatrical composition, cares naturally much less for the closet of the solitary reader. In the first formation of a national stage, more especially, we find frequent examples of such negligence. Of the almost innumerable pieces of Lopez de Vega, many undoubtedly never were printed, and are thereby lost; and Cervantes did not print his earlier dramas, though he certainly boasts of them as meritorious works. As Shakspeare, on his retiring from the theatre, left his manuscripts behind with his fellow-managers, he might rely on theatrical tradition for handing them down to posterity, which would indeed have been sufficient for that purpose, if the closing of the theatres, under the oppression of the puritans, had not interrupted the natural order of things. We know, besides, that the poets used then to sell the exclusive possession of their pieces to a theatre: it is therefore not improbable that the right of property in his unprinted pieces was no longer vested in Shakspeare, or had not at least yet reverted to him. His fellow-managers entered on the publi