he says, "The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. He says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the playhouse as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family; but the male line is extinguished." Aubrey's anecdotes of Shakspere are supposed to have been collected about 1680. The letterwriter from Warwickshire was gratifying his honourable curiosity about him whom he styles "our English tragedian" in 1693. The parish clerk "above eighty years old" was probably the informant of both parties. He would have been about three years old when Shakspere died; and the period of Shakspere's apprenticeship which he records would have been some forty years earlier. Absolute correctness, therefore, was not likely to have been attained by this honest chronicler. The accounts, it will be seen, materially differ. Aubrey says, "His father was a butcher;" the parish clerk, "He was bound apprentice to a butcher." To the edition of Shakspere's works published by Rowe in 1709, was prefixed a ‘Life.' Rowe acknowledges "a particular obligation" to Betterton, the celebrated actor, "for the most considerable part of the passages relating to this life, which I have here transmitted to the public; his veneration for the memory of Shakspeare having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great a veneration." Betterton, then, thus speaking through Rowe, says, "He was the son of Mr. John Shakspeare, and was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 1564. His family, as appears by the register and public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool,"&c. But Malone, in his posthumous 'Life' of the poet, has published a document which is held to be decisive as to this question. It is a record of proceedings in the Bailiff's Court in 1555, in which some process is shown to have been taken against John Shakyspere, of Stratford, glover. Malone has argued that this was a considerable branch of trade, and no doubt it was. But we are by no means certain that John Shak yspere the glover was the same person as the poet's father. There was another John Shakspere living in Stratford, who has been repeatedly mistaken for the more interesting butcher, woolman, or glover; and the mistake, we believe, has gone somewhat further than has been acknowledged. He was a younger man than the father of our poet, for he married in He was a shoemaker, as is proved by repeated entries in the books of the corporation. Might not his father have been the glover in 1555? Shakspere appears to have been one of the most common names in the town of Stratford; and we have also, as well as John, the shoemaker, Thomas, a butcher. About the same period William Shakspere's father is called a yeoman in one of the deeds relating to his property. We believe, as we shall presently show, that he was originally of the rank which is denominated gentleman at the present day; he was subsequently legally recognised as a gentleman, in the sense in which the word was used in former days. It was not incompatible with this opinion that he should be either a butcher or à dealer in wool. Whether he possessed any patrimonial property or not, he undoubtedly, by marriage, became the proprietor of an estate. He married, as we shall see, an heiress-a lady of ancient family. It was after this marriage that he was designated by some a butcher, by others a dealer in wool. There is a mode of reconciling these contradictory statements which has been overlooked by those who have been anxious to prove that Shakspere was not the son of a butcher. In Harrison's Description of England' we have an exact notice of the state of society at the precise time when John Shakspere, the possessor of landed property, was either a butcher or a woolman, or both. We have here a complaint of the exactions of landlords towards their tenants, particularly in the matter of demanding a premium on leases; and it thus proceeds: "But most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great

1581.

port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have any gain at all, that they themselves become graziers, BUTCHERS, tanners, SHEEPMASTERS, woodmen, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their own hands, leaving the commonalty weak, or as an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in a time of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." The term "gentleman-farmer" was not invented in Harrison's time, or we should, we believe, have had a pretty correct description of the occupation of John Shakspere.

But we have now to inquire who was the mother of William Shakspere? His father died in 1601. On the 9th of September, 1608, we have an entry in the Stratford register of burial, “Mary Shakspere, widow." We learn from an unquestionable document, a bill in chancery-of the date of November 24th, 1597,-that John Shakspere and Mary his wife were "lawfully seized in their demesne as of fee as in the right of the said Mary of and in one messuage and one yard land, with the appurtenances, lying and being in Wylnecote." In the will of Robert Arden, dated November 24th, 1556, we find,--" I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter Mary all my land in Willmecote, called Asbyes, and the crop upon the ground," &c. She was further left the sum of six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence. The grandfather of Mary Arden was groom of the chamber to Henry VII., and he was the nephew of Sir John Arden, squire of the body to the same king. Sir John Arden was a son of Walter Arden and of Eleanor, the daughter of John Hampden of Buckinghamshire. There were thus the ties of a common blood between William Shakspere and one of the most distinguished men of the next generation-John Hampden, who was a student in the Inner Temple when the poet died. Mary Arden's property has been computed to be worth some hundred and ten pounds of the money of her time. Let not the luxurious habits of the present age lead us to smile at such a fortune. All the worldly goods (except his lands) belonging to her father were in the inventory attached to his will valued at seventy-seven pounds eleven shillings and tenpence; and these goods included numerous oxen, bullocks, kine, horses, sheep, besides wheat in the field and in the barn. It is probable that Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakspere soon after her father's death, which was in 1556. She was the youngest daughter; and she no doubt married young, for under any circumstances she must have been an aged woman when she died in 1608.

Of these parents, then, was William Shakspere born, in 1564, in the town of Stratford. In that town there is a street retaining its ancient name, Henley-street, being the road to Henleyin-Arden, where, in 1574, stood two houses with a garden and orchard annexed to each; and these houses were then purchased by John Shakspere. It is said that William Shakspere was born in one of these houses. His father may have inhabited the house before the purchase; and it is more than probable that he did, for at a court-leet in 1556 there is an entry of an assignment to him of the lease of a house in Henley-street, and of another in Greenhill-street. There is nothing to prove that the poet was not born in the house in Henley-street and there that house still stands, altered according to modern fashion, its gable roofs destroyed,-divided and subdivided into smaller tenements,-part converted into a little inn, part the residence of a female who shows the room where it is alleged that Shakspere first saw the light, and the lowroofed kitchen where his mother taught him to read. We believe it all. The walls of that venerated bedroom are covered literally with thousands of names, inscribed in homage by pilgrims from every region where the glory of Shakspere is known. And there some of the greatest of those who have trodden, at whatever distance from him, the same path,-the Scotts, and Byrons, and Washington Irvings of our own day,— have recorded their visits, amongst the multitude who have not lived in vain for themselves or others if they have drawn

The above is a representation of the house in which Shakspere is said to have been born, as it was some twenty-five years ago. The centre, which is here represented as a butcher's shop, is not so used at the present time. We give an engraving at p. 16, from a drawing made about 1770, which exhibits a much more uniform appearance, showing that a very respectable family might not disdain to inhabit such a tenement even in our own day. At the time when Shakspere's father bought this house, it was, no doubt, a mansion as compared with the majority of houses in Stratford. There is an order from the Privy Council to the bailiff of Stratford, after a great fire which happened there in 1614, pointing out that fires had been very frequently occasioned there" by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combustible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without restraint." Stratford, like nearly every other town of England in that day, closely built, imperfectly drained, was subject to periodical visitations of the plague. From the average annual number of births and burials we may infer that the usual number of the inhabitants was about 1200. When William Shakspere was about two months old the plague broke out in this town, and, in the short space of six months, 238 persons, a fifth of the population, fell victims. The average annual mortality was about forty. No one of the family of Shakspere appears to have died during this visitation. One of the biographers of "the Bard of Avon," as he is pulingly called, says, "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." We desire to be poetical enthusiasts in matters which belong to poetry, but in this case we must be content to believe that the house in which the infant Shakspere was cradled was, compared with other houses, well ventilated and clean, that his family possessed sufficient of the necessaries and comforts of life,-and that every proper precaution was taken to ward off the danger. In 1566 another son, Gilbert, was born. The head of this growing family was actively engaged, no doubt, in private and public duties. In 1568 John Shakspere became the bailiff, or chief magistrate, of Stratford. This office, during the period in which he held it, would confer rank upon him, in an age when the titles and degrees of men were attended to with great exactness. Malone says that, from the year 1569, the entries, either in the corporation-books or the parochial registers, referring to the father of the poet, bear the addition of master, and that this honour

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able distinction was in consequence of his having served the office of bailiff. We doubt this inference exceedingly. John Shakspere would not have acquired a permanent rank by having filled an annual office. But he did acquire that permanent rank in the year 1569, in the only way in which it could be legally acquired. A grant of arms was then made to him by Robert Cooke, Clarencieux. The grant itself is lost, but it was confirmed by Dethick, Garter King at Arms, and Camden, in 1599. That confirmation contains the following preamble: Being solicited, and by credible report informed, that John Shakspere, now of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gent., whose parent and greatgrandfather, late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince, King Henry VII., of famous memory, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements, given to him in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit; and for that the said John Shakspere having married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wellingcote, in the said county, and also produced this his ancient coat-of-arms, heretofore assigned to him whilst he was her majesty's officer and bailiff of that town: in consideration of the premises," &c. Nothing, we should imagine, could be clearer than this. John Shakspere produces his ancient coatof-arms, assigned to him whilst he was bailiff of Stratford; and he recites also that he married one of the heirs of Arden of Wellingcote. Garter and Clarencieux, in consequence, allow him to impale the arms of Shakspere with the ancient arms of Arden of Wellingcote. The Shakspere arms were actually derived from the family name; and we give a representation of the united arms as they were used in the seal of William Shakspere's daughter,—most probably it was his own seal and yet Malone has a most elaborate argument to prove that the grant of arms was made entirely with reference to the circumstance that John Shakspere had married one of the daughters and heirs of Arden of Wellingcote. Such questions may appear frivolous and unworthy to be discussed in the notice of a man so elevated above the accidents of birth and station; and we may think of the words of another poet, one of Nature's own nobles,

"A prince can mak a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, and a' that,

But an honest man's aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa' that."

Yet the subject is important in connexion with the education of Shakspere. A great deal of what would appear little

Unna hall

less than miraculous in his writings, especially with reference to the almost boundless amount of knowledge which they contain on every subject, will raise in us not a vulgar wonder but a rational admiration when we look at him as a well-nurtured child, brought up by parents living in comfort if not in affluence, and trained in those feelings of honour which were more especially held the possession of those of gentle blood. William, the son of Master John Shakspere, would, without any prejudice for mere rank, be a different person from the son of Goodman Shakspere, butcher. We can scarcely conceive him killing a calf "in a high style" without seeing him surrounded with the usual companions and associations of the slaughterhouse. His father and mother were, we have no doubt, educated persons; not indeed familiar with many books, but knowing some thoroughly; cherishing a kindly love of nature and of rural enjoyments amidst the beautiful English scenery by which they were surrounded; admirers and cultivators of music, as all persons above the lowest rank were in those days; frugal and orderly in all their household arrangements; of habitual benevolence and piety. We have a belief, which amounts to a conviction as strong as could be derived from any direct evidence, that the mind of William Shakspere was chiefly moulded by his mother. No writer that ever lived has in the slightest degree approached him in his delineations of the grace and purity of the female character; and we scarcely exaggerate in saying that a very great deal of the just appreciation of women in England has been produced through our national familiarity with the works of Shakspere. It was he who first embodied the notionand he has repeated it in shapes as various as they are beautiful-of

"A perfect woman, nobly plann'd,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright

With something of an angel light."

Had his boyhood been surrounded with ignorance, or vulgarity, or selfishness, in female shapes, we doubt if our Desdemonas, and Violas, and Mirandas, would have been quite so perfect. But a father's influence could not have been wanting in his culture. If his father, and his father's companions, had been examples of coarseness, and sensuality, and indifference to high and ennobling pursuits, we doubt if his wondrous gallery of full-length portraits of thorough gentlemen of all ages and countries would have attained its present completeness. We are not sure that the poor mad Lear, in his paroxysms of anguish, would have said,

"Pray you, undo this button; thank

you,

sir;"

or that Polonius would have advised his son,

"To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Malone assures us that Shakspere's father could not write. We were perfectly satisfied that the statement was untrue; and we have taken some pains, therefore, to examine the evidence which was produced for this assertion. Putting the higher considerations of the poet's education out of the question, we thought it scarcely consistent with his habitual reverence for those things which we are called upon to honour, that he should make his own father the subject of his satire, and that during his father's lifetime, in the praise which Jack Cade bestows upon those who "do not use to write their names, but have a mark of their own, like honest plain-dealing men." Malone tells us that John Shakspere had a mark of his own, and it " nearly resembles a capital A, and was perhaps chosen in honour of the lady whom he had married." He farther says, "Out of nineteen persons who signed a paper relative to one of their body who had been elected bailiff, ten of whom were aldermen, and the rest burgesses, seven only could write their names; and among the twelve marksmen is found John Shakspere;" and that he derives his knowledge of the facts from an Order, dated September 27, 1564. The reader shall judge for himself of the truth of this assertion. We give an exact fac-simile of the Order, which a most careful artist was permitted to make for us from the old council-book of the corporation of Stratford. (No. 1.) There may be a doubt, the reader may think, whether the mark which "nearly resembles a capital A" belongs to "George Whateley, high bailiff," in the first column, or "Jhon Shacksper," in the second column. Malone, who asserts that it belongs to our poet's father, had the corporation-books in his possession for many years; but he omitted to find an entry of the 29th of January, 1589, when John Shakspere had ceased to be a member of the corporation. He did not then, of course, record his ignorance in the corporation-books; but George Whateley still uses the same big A. In a quarter of a century he had not learned to write. We give a fac-simile of this entry, which we trust is decisive. (No. 2.)

Malone talks as if John Shakspere's use of a mark was a common thing. There is not another example in the corporation-books in which the name of John Shakspere is attached to any order of a common hall. Mr. Wheler, of Stratford, who is honourably distinguished for his attention to matters connected with Shakspere, informs us that such orders were very rarely signed by members of the corporation who were present, but that the entry to which the name of John Shakspere is affixed was a very special one.

William Shakspere, then, we think had a mother who could read, and a father who could write. They probably could do something more in the way of advancing the intelligence of their son. But, at any rate, when he became old enough, they would send their boy to the endowed grammar-school of the town in which they lived. He probably went there about 1571, when his father had become chief alderman of the

town.

The free-school of Stratford was founded in the reign of Henry VI., and received a charter from Edward VI. It was open to all boys, natives of the borough; and, like all the grammar-schools of that age, was under the direction of men who, as clergymen and graduates of the universities, were qualified to diffuse that sound scholarship which was once the boast of England. We have no record of Shakspere having been at this school; but there can be no rational doubt that he was educated there. His father could not have procured for him a better education anywhere. It is perfectly clear to those who have studied his works (without being influenced by prejudices, which have been most carefully cherished, implying that he had received a very narrow education) that they abound with evidences that he must have been solidly grounded in the learning, properly so called, which was taught in grammar-schools. As he did not adopt any one of the learned pro