is, that Shakspeare's sole grandaughter, Lady Barnard, was married on the 22d of April, 1626, ten years exactly from the poet's death; and the reason for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious grandfather's birth-day; which, there is good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations. Still this choice

have been an accident, or governed may merely by reason of convenience. And, on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief, that Shakspeare was born and died on the 23d of April. We cannot do wrong if we drink to his memory on both the 22d and 23d."

An excellent conclusion! We would improve upon it, by proposing that the libation cup should be pledged on both days according to the old as well as the new style. The 22d and 23d of April in Shakspeare's day, answered to our 2d and 3d of May. May-day is already a festival dedicated to Flora and the Muses:"Woods and groves are of her dressing, Hill and dale doth boast her blessing!" Now, if we add the 2d and 3d, we have a trio of commemoration days, in which the wine-cup may flow to May-day and to Shakspeare!

"Thus we salute thee with our early song,

And welcome thee, and wish thee long.'

It is curious that nearly all the authentic information we possess regarding Shakspeare personally should be derived from legal documents. Themis for once played handmaid to Apollo. Mr. Collier, by hunting among the papers of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, preserved at Bridgewater House, discovered that the poet was a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre so early as 1579, two or three years after his supposed departure from Stratford. In 1608, cight years before his death, Shakspeare's property in the Blackfriars Theatre, including the wardrobe (which was exclusively his), was estimated at more than 14007.; which would be equal, as Mr. Collier computes, to six or seven thousand pounds of our present money. Now,

if we conclude that the Globe Theatre was as profitable as the Blackfriars (it was a larger building), we must assign to the poet a princely income-full 1500l. per annum of our present money. He had the best house in Stratford, with meadows, tithes, and messuages; and, though he early abandoned the city and the court, where he was highly honoured -making, as Ben Jonson says,

"Those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Elisa and our James,"he was doubtless a happier man in his native vale, surrounded by the glory of his fame and his provincial wealth, no less than by his early friends, than he could have been pursuing a profession which he abhorred with all its superadded emolu

ments.

Mr. Collier's discoveries were made in 1835. Next year, Shakspeare's marriage license cast up at Worcester. It bears date the 28th of November, 1582. Two sureties, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, both described as agricole, or yeomen, and both incapable of writing their names, entered into a bond for the payment of 401. sterling, in the event of Shakspeare, yet a minor, and incapable of binding himself, failing to fulfil the conditions of the license. The document is only important for one object, -it proves that the poet's daughter was born six months after marriage. Alas for poor Ann Hathaway! The fascination of the boy-poet's love made her forget the sober dictates of twenty-s -seven years. As old Crabbe

says,"What sought these lovers, then, by day, by night,

But stolen moments of disturb'd delight; Soft trembling tumults, terrors dearly prized,

Transports that pain'd, and joys that

agonised.

Then came the day of shame, the grievous night,

The varying look, the wandering appetite; The joy assumed while sorrow dimm'd the eyes,

The forced sad smiles that follow'd sud. den sighs."

But we cannot follow the harrowing picture. Darkly must the evening shades have descended on fair Shottery at this season of grief and shame! De Quincey rather uncharitably insinuates that Ann Hathaway drew on the blushing novice, and involved him, by female blandishments and female arts, into a premature marriage. He builds much on the scene in the Twelfth Night,

"Let still the woman take An elder than herself; so wears she to him,

So sways she level in her husband's heart. For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,

Than women's are.

Viola. I think it well, my lord. Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent; For women are as roses, whose fair

flower

Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour."

The scene is striking; and another passage in the Tempest, where Prospero cautions Ferdinand to take heed as "Hymen's lamps shall light him" in his passionate intercourse with Miranda, also points a moral. But we should look tenderly and gently on the wrong side of a great man. Shakspeare was as much to blame as his betrothed; perhaps more, if we knew the sorcery and witchery of his conversation. We have, in fact, no data on which to build conjectures respecting Shakspeare's matrimonial life. His return to Stratford is in favour of the conclusion that he enjoyed domestic peace. We think, therefore, that De Quincey's ingenious prelections are not borne out by facts. But still more absurd is the attempt made by William Howitt to shew, on the other hand, that the poet has "left the most triumphant testimonies of his strong and changeless affection to his Ann Hathaway." In proof of this Shakspeare's sonnets are quoted-sonnets addressed chiefly to a male friend, and acknowledged on all hands to be effusions of exaggerated euphuistic friendship, suited to the quaint elaborateness of Elizabeth's times, but certainly not embodying genuine or natural feelings. Mr. Howitt prepared to adopt the

Is

ninth, where the poet asks of the subject of his eulogy,

"Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye

That thou consum'st thyself in single life?"

This, at least, was not Ann Hathaway. But the whole inference is absurd; almost as absurd as George Chalmers's conjecture that Queen Elizabeth was typified by the poet's masculine friend!

We lately heard the venerable author of The Pleasures of Memory maintain, in playful earnestness, that the sonnets were not in reality written by Shakspeare. They are inferior to his Venus and Adonis, which he tells us, in the dedication, was "the first heir of his invention." "I cannot believe," said Rogers, "that the man who wrote the Tempest could have written the sonnets. There are passages in all Shakspeare's plays which nobody but Shakspeare could have written, whereas the sonnets do not contain a line that could not have been written by others. I cannot think his free spirit could have voluntarily submitted to fetter itself through a hundred and fifty sonnets. Nobody recollects a passage in them. When Miranda says, after the declaration of love made by Ferdinand,

"'I am a fool

To weep at what I am glad of,'

she says what you cannot forget; you can never blot the words from your memory. There are hundreds of such passages. Now, I cannot remember any part of the sonnets; and I never met with a man who could repeat a line and a half of one of them." Thomas Campbell was present, and he instanced the noble sonnet about the marriage of true friends." He could not, however, at the moment call up the stipulated line and a half. Another of the party happened to recollect two lines, and quoted them as both Shakspearian and beautiful :

"The summer flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only bloom and die." "They are pretty," said Rogers; "but many poets could have written them besides Shakspeare. I fancy 1 could have done it myself." And probably he was right; but, in such

a field, few can shoot with the bow of Rogers. As to the genuineness of the sonnets, we have the internal testimony furnished by the allusions they contain to the poet's profession of an actor. Externally, there is the publisher's statement; and also the declaration of Meres, made nine years previous, that "the sweet wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspeare; witnes his Venus and Adonis; his Lucrece; his sugred sonnets among his private friends." After all, who could in that day have written the following but Shakspeare? With what a noble sweep does it begin!—

"Full many a glorious morning have I

Mr. Collier has added some new particulars respecting Shakspeare, in his Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, lately published by the Shakspeare Society. They are of no great importance; but the slightest fact is as welcome as a fresh bottle of Lafitte, or as a pot of the smallest ale was to Christopher Sly. The Shaksperian thirst is unquenchable. Alleyn was a careful, judicious, kind-hearted man of the stage. He loved his wife (whom he playfully called his mouse); and when "starring it" in the country, he remembered his little garden at Bankside, in Southwark. Such quiet, domestic sketches as the following afford a fine relief to the rant, dissipation, and licentiousness that then too strongly marked the theatres. Alleyn writes to his wife from Bristol:

"Mouse, you send me no newes of any things you should send of your domestycall matters, such thing as hapens att home; as how your distilled watter proves, or this, or that, or any thing what you will. And, Jug, I pray you, lett my orayng tawny stokins of wolen be dyed a very good blak against I com hom, to wear in the winter. You sente me nott word of my garden, but next tym you will; but remember this in any case, that all that bed which was parsley in the month of September you sowe itt with spinage, for then is the tym. I would do itt my selfe but we shall nott com hom till allhollandtyd. And so, swett mouse, farwell, and brooke our long jorney with patience."

Shakspeare must have loved the Alleyns-old Edward, the mouse, and the garden; and it would appear he often dropped into their house. Mrs. Alleyn, in writing to her husband, mentions that a certain Mr. Francis Chaloner wished to borrow ten pounds from her; but

"Mr. Shakspeare, of the Globe, who said he knewe hym not,

came

*

onely he herde of hym that he was a roge so he was glade we did not lend him the monney."

The paper on which this letter is written is described by Mr. Collier as being in a most decayed state; but enough remains to prove that the great poet was on terms of good neighbourhood with this worthy pair, his rivals in theatrical property and in opulence. Mr. Collier establishes the fact that Shakspeare was numbered among the actors of the company up to April 1604. Hitherto the last trace we have had of the great dramatist as actually on the stage, has been as one of the performers in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which was produced in 1603. The Dulwich papers, quoted by Mr. Collier, also prove that Shakspeare was living in Southwark in 1609; for in a document indorsed, “1609. The estate of the poores booke, the 8 of Aprill, for the Clink," it is stated that he was rated as an "inhabitant" at 6d. per week. "Mr. Shakspeare"

stands at the head of the list to which he belongs; and as he is rated at the highest sum paid by any body in the district called the Liberty of the Clink, we are warranted in concluding that he lived at that time in as good a house as any of his neighbours. It

has been doubted whether Shakspeare's family ever removed from Stratford to London; but he would scarcely have occupied one of the best residences in Southwark, or kept up an expensive establishment, unless his fair Ann Hathaway had been by his side. His bachelor life would have been more private and prudential.

Much nonsense has been written on the supposed infelicity of Shakspeare's matrimonial lot. Every critical jackdaw has a peck at the glorious plumage of the bird of paradise. They can never fix him to the earth, for all their theories and conjectures are but Lilliputian threads spun from their own brains. Nothing can shake our conviction that the poet's genius could not have exerted itself so fully, so genially, on all subjects,-could not have expanded so as to embrace all human sympathies, feelings, situations, and passions, if it had not been constantly in the light and sunshine of domestic happiness or content. His mind would have been soured, and the finer sensibilities of his nature warped and contracted, if he had lived on terms of unkindness with his wife. The great and benevolent magician would have been exchanged for the bitter satirist, or the selfish sensualist. "For a man to write well," says Cowley, "it is necessary to be in good humour; neither is wit more eclipsed by unquietness of mind, than beauty with indisposition of body; so that it is almost as hard a thing to be a poet in despite of fortune, as it is in despite of nature." There is no evidence that Shakspeare's family continued to live apart from him in Stratford; on the contrary, the reverse may be fairly implied, from all the knowledge we possess of the circumstances of the case.

Then,

with respect to the supposed neglect of his wife in his will, it has been shewn by Mr. Charles Knight that by the operation of the English law the poet's widow was already provided for his estates were chiefly freehold, and his wife was entitled to her dower, or thirds. We are convinced also that a right in his plays, which were so valuable to the theatres, was vested in his widow. The right died with her, and accordingly the very year of her death— some six months afterwards-we find

the first collected edition of his works issue from the press. There is another circumstance-slight, perhaps, but green and bright in our imagination-which has often recurred to us in reviewing this part of the poet's life. To prove the early prosperity of Shakspeare, Malone publishes a letter written by a citizen of Stratford, Abraham Sturley, about the year 1598" Our countryman, Mr. Shakspeare," says the writer, "is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yard - land or other, at Shottery, or neare about us." The letter undoubtedly proves that Shakspeare was a thriving man, and had money to invest in land. But it proves something more. Why did he select Shottery? Simply and solely, we think, because it was there he had wooed and won his Ann Hathaway. The "odd yard-land" must have had many agreeable recollections to both, now that Fortune had smiled on the gifted adventurer. There Ann Hathaway was born, there her relations resided; and to call this spot their own, would at once have gratified their love and their ambition. The first purchase of Shakspeare was in reality a delightful memento of the affections. If his marriage had been an unhappy one, the poet would never have thought of perpetuating his connexion with this beautiful village, its fertile yard-land, or its pleasant meadows.

The probable date of Shakspeare's final retirement to the country has lately received fresh light from the indefatigable labours of Mr. Collier, as well as from the deed of sale of Shakspeare's house in Blackfriars. Among Alleyn's papers at Dulwich College is one which appears to be a rough memorandum of various sums paid by him, in April 1612, for the Blackfriars; and though the theatre is not there expressly named, it seems evident that it was "the play-house." April 1612. Money paid by me, E. A., for the Blackfryers £160 0 0 More for the Blackfryers.. 126 0 0 More againe for the lease.. The writings for the same,

....

and other small charges

310 0 0

36 8."

The whole sum is 5991. 6s. 8d., which (according to Mr. Collier) would be equal to nearly 3000l. of our present