man appears to have made some collections for the biography of our English poets, and, under the name Shakspere, he gives the dates of his birth and death. But Davies, who added notes to his friend's manuscripts, affords us the following piece of information: "He was much given to all unluckiness, in stealing venison and rabbits; particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country, to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three louses rampant for his arms." The accuracy of this chronicler, as to events supposed to have happened a hundred years before he wrote, may be inferred from his correctness in what was accessible to him. Justice Clodpate is a new character; and the three louses rampant have diminished strangely from the "dozen white luces" of Master Slender. In Mr. Davies's account we have no mention of the ballad-through which, according to Rowe, the young poet revenged his "ill-usage." But Capell, the editor of Shakspere, found a new testimony to that fact: "The writer of his Life,' the first modern (Rowe), speaks of a 'lost ballad,' which added fuel, he says, to the knight's before-con- | ceived anger, and 'redoubled the prosecution;' and calls the ballad the first essay of Shakespere's poetry: one stanza of it, which has the appearance of genuine, was put into the editor's hands many years ago by an ingenious gentleman (grandson of its preserver), with this account of the way in which it descended to him' Mr. Thomas Jones, who dwelt at Tarbick, a village in Worcestershire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon, and died in the year 1703, aged upwards of ninety, remembered to have heard from several old people at Stratford the story of Shakespere's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park; and their account of it agreed with Mr. Rowe's, with this addition, that the ballad written against Sir Thomas by Shakespere was stuck upon his park-gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him. Mr. Jones had put down in writing the first stanza of the ballad, which was all he remembered of it, and Mr. Thomas Wilkes (my grandfather) transmitted it to my father by memory, who also took it in writing." This, then, is the entire evidence as to the deer-stealing tradition. According to Rowe, the young Shakspere was engaged more than once in robbing a park, for which he was prosecuted by Sir Thomas Lucy; he made a ballad upon his prosecutor, and then, being more severely pursued, fled to London. According to Davies, he was much given to all unluckiness, in stealing venison and rabbits; for which he was often whipped, sometimes imprisoned, and at last forced to fly the country. According to Jones, the tradition of Rowe was correct as to robbing the park; and the obnoxious ballad being | stuck upon the park-gate, a lawyer of Warwick was authorized to prosecute the offender. The tradition is thus full of contradictions upon the face of it. It

necessarily would be so, for each of the witnesses speaks of circumstances that must have happened a hundred years before his time. The state of the law, as to the offence for which William Shakspere is said to have been prosecuted; the state of public opinion, as to the offence; and the position of Sir Thomas Lucy, as regarded his immediate neighbours-all these circumstances go very far to destroy the credibility of the tradition.

Charlcote, then, shall not, at least by us, be surrounded by unpleasant associations in connexion with the name of Shakspere. It is, perhaps, the most interesting locality connected with that name; for in its great features it is essentially unchanged. There stands, with slight alteration, and those in good taste, the old mansion as it was reared in the days of Elizabeth. A broad avenue leads to its fine gateway, which opens into the court and the principal entrance. We would desire to people that hall with kindly inmates; to imagine the fine old knight, perhaps a little too puritanical, indeed, in his latter days, living there in peace and happiness with his family; merry as he ought to have been with his first wife, Jocosa (whose English name, Joyce, sounded not quite so pleasant), and whose epitaph, by her husband, is honourable alike to the deceased and to the survivor: "All the time of her life a true and faithful servant of her good God; never detected of any crime or vice; in religion, most sound; in love to her husband, most faithful and true; in friendship, most constant; to what in trust was committed to her, most secret; in wisdom, excelling; in governing her house, and bringing up of youth in the fear of God, that did converse with her, most rare and singular. A great maintainer of hospitality; greatly esteemed of her betters; misliked of none, unless of the envious. When all is spoken that can be said, a woman so furnished and garnished with virtue as not to be bettered, and hardly to be equalled, of any. As she lived most virtuously, so she died most godly:

"Set down by him that best did know

What hath been written to be true.-Thomas Lucy."

We can picture Sir Thomas planting the second avenue, which leads obliquely across the park from the great gateway to the porch of the parish-church. It is an avenue too narrow for carriages, if carriages then had been common; and the knight and his lady walk in stately guise along that grassy pathway, as the Sunday bells summon them to meet their humble neighbours in a place where all are equal. Charlcote is full of rich woodland scenery. The lime-tree avenue may, perhaps, be of a later date than the age of Elizabeth; and one elm has evidently succeeded another from century to century. But there are old gnarled oaks and beeches dotted about the park. Its little knolls and valleys are the same as they were two centuries ago. The same Avon flows beneath the gentle elevation on which the house stands, sparkling in the sunshine as brightly as when that house was first built. There may we still lie

"Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out

Upon the book that brawls along this wood,"

and doubt not that there was the place to which

"A poor sequester'd stag,

That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,

Did come to languish."

There may we still see

"A careless herd,

Full of the pasture,"

leaping gaily along, or crossing the river at their own will in search of fresh fields and low branches whereon to browse.

The village of Charlcote is now one of the prettiest objects. Whatever is new about it-and most of the cottages are new-looks like a restoration of what was old. The same character prevails in the neighbouring village of Hampton Lucy; and it may not be too much to assume that the memory of him who walked in these pleasant places in his younger days, long before the sound of his greatness had gone forth to the ends of the earth, has led to the desire to preserve here something of the architectural character of the age in which he lived. There are a few old houses still left in Charlcote; but the more important have probably been swept away.

In the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' which we hold to be one of Shakspere's very early plays, he has denoted some of the characteristics of the Avon of his boyhood:

"The current, that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage;

But, when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;

And so by many winding nooks he strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean."

Very lovely is this Avon for some miles above Stratford; a poet's river in its beauty and its peacefulness. It is disturbed with no sound of traffic; it holds its course unvexed by man through broad meadows and wooded acclivities, which for generations seem to have been dedicated to solitude. All the great natural features of the river must have suffered little change since the time of Shakspere. Inundations in some places may have widened the channel; osier islands may have grown up where there was once a broad stream. But we here look upon the same scenery upon which he looked, as truly as we gaze upon the same blue sky, and see its image in the same glassy water.

The Avon necessarily derives its chief interest from its associations with Shakspere. His contemporaries connected his fame with his native river :

"Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were,

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

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

So wrote Jonson in his manly lines, "To the Memory
of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspere,
and what he hath left us." After him came Davenant,
with a pretty conceit that the river had lost its beauty
when the great poet no longer dwelt upon its banks :-
"Beware, delighted poets, when you sing,
To welcome nature in the early spring,
Your numerous feet not tread

The banks of Avon; for each flow'r,
As it ne'er knew a sun or show'r,

Hangs there the pensive head.

Each tree, whose thick and spreading growth hath made Rather a night beneath the boughs than shade,

Unwilling now to grow,

Looks like the plume a captain wears, Whose rifled falls are steep'd i' the tears

Which from his last rage flow.

The piteous river wept itself away
Long since, alas! to such a swift decay,
That, reach the map, and look

If you a river there can spy,
And, for a river, your mock'd eye
Will find a shallow brook."*

66

Joseph Warton describes fair Fancy discovering the infant Shakspere on the winding Avon's willowed banks." Thomas Warton has painted the scenery of the Avon and its associations with a bright pencil :

"Avon, thy rural views, thy pastures wild,

The willows that o'er-hang thy twilight edge,
Their boughs entangling with the embattled sedge;
Thy brink with watery foliage quaintly fring'd,
Thy surface with reflected verdure ting'd;
Soothe me with many a pensive pleasure mild.
But while I muse, that here the Bard Divine,
Whose sacred dust yon high-arch'd aisles enclose,
Where the tall windows rise in stately rows
Above th' embowering shade,

Here first, at Fancy's fairy-circled shrine,
Of daisies pied, his infant offering made;
Here, playful yet, in stripling years unripe,
Fram'd of thy reeds a shrill and artless pipe:
Sudden thy beauties, Avon, all are fled,
As at the waving of some magic wand;
An holy trance my charmed spirit wings,
And awful shapes of leaders and of kings,
People the busy mead,

Like spectres swarming to the wizard's hall;
And slowly pace, and point with trembling hand
The wounds ill-cover'd by the purple pall.

Before me Pity seems to stand,

A weeping mourner, smote with anguish sore

To see Misfortune rend in frantic mood

His robe, with regal woes embroider'd o'er.

Pale Terror leads the visionary band,

And sternly shakes his sceptre, dropping blood." †

The well-known lines of Gray are among his happiest efforts :

"Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face: the dauntless child
Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smil'd.
'This pencil take,' she said, 'whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy!

This can unlock the gates of joy;

Of horror that, and thrilling fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.""

These quotations sufficiently show that the presiding genius of the Avon is Shakspere. But even without this paramount association, the river, although little visited, abounds with picturesque scenery and interesting objects.

Shottery, the prettiest of hamlets, is scarcely a mile from Stratford. Here, in all probability, dwelt one who was to have an important influence upon the destiny of the boy-poet. We cannot say, absolutely, that Anne Hathaway, the future wife of William Shakspere, was of Shottery; but the prettiest of * In Remembrance of Master William Shakspere. Ode. Monody, written near Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Progress of Poesy.

maidens (for the veracious antiquarian boldly says there is a tradition that she was eminently beautiful) would have fitly dwelt in the pleasantest of hamlets. Shakspere's marriage bond, which was discovered a few years since, has set at rest all doubt as to the name and residence of his wife. She is there described as Anne Hathwey, of Stratford, in the diocese of Worcester, maiden. Rowe, in his 'Life,' says:"Upon his leaving school he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him; and in order to settle in the world, after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young. His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford." At the hamlet of Shottery, which is in the parish of Stratford, the Hathaways had been settled forty years before the period of Shakspere's marriage; for in the Warwickshire Surveys, in the time of Philip and Mary, it is recited that John Hathaway held property at Shottery. by copy of court-roll, dated 20th of April, 34th of Henry VIII. (1543).* The Hathaway of Shakspere's time was named Richard; and the intimacy between him and John Shakspere is shown by a precept in an action against Richard Hathaway, dated 1579, in which John Shakspere is his bondman. Before the discovery of the marriage-bond Malone had found a confirmation of the traditional account that the maiden name of Shakspere's wife was Hathaway; for Lady Barnard, the grand-daughter of Shakspere, makes bequests in her will to the children of Thomas Hathaway, "her kinsman." But Malone doubts whether there were not other Hathaways than those of Shottery, residents in the town of Stratford, and not in the hamlet included in the parish. This is possible. But, on the other hand, the description in the marriagebond of Anne Hathaway, as of Stratford, is no proof that she was not of Shottery; for such a document would necessarily have regard only to the parish of the person described. Tradition, always valuable when it is not opposed to evidence, has associated for many years the cottage of the Hathaways at Shottery with the wife of Shakspere. Garrick purchased relics out of it at the time of the Stratford Jubilee; Samuel Ireland afterwards carried off what was called Shakspere's courting-chair; and there is still in the house a very ancient carved bedstead, which has been handed down from descendant to descendant as an heir

loom. The house was, no doubt, once adequate to form a comfortable residence for a substantial and even wealthy yeoman. It is still a pretty cottage, embosomed by trees, and surrounded by pleasant pastures: and here the young poet might have surrendered his prudence to his affections:-

"As in the sweetest buds The eating canker dwells, so eating love Inhabits in the finest wits of all."t

*The Shottery property, which was called Hewland, remained with the decendants of the Hathaways till 1838. Amongst the laudable objects proposed by the Shaksperian Club was the purchase and preservation of this property.

Two Gentlemen of Verona,' Act i. Scene 1.

The very early marriage of the young man, with one more than seven years his elder, has been supposed to have been a rash and passionate proceeding. Upon the face of it, it appears an act that might at least be reproved in the words which follow those we have just quoted :

"As the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn'd to folly; blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes."

This is the common consequence of precocious marriages; but we are not therefore to conclude that "the young and tender wit" of our Shakspere was "turned to folly"-that "his forward bud" was "eaten by the canker"-that "his verdure" was lost 66 even in the prime" by his marriage with Anne Hathaway before he was nineteen. The influence which this marriage must have had upon his destinies was no doubt considerable; but it is too much to assume, as it has been assumed, that it was an unhappy influence. All that we really know of Shakspere's family life warrants the contrary supposition.

His visits to them

In 1603

Stratford and its neighbourhood are not less associated with the Shakspere of middle and later life. He left Stratford, as we believe, about 1585 or 1586. If he were absent alone during a portion of the year from his native place, his family probably lived under the roof of his father and mother. would not necessarily be of rare occurrence, and of short duration. The latter part of the summer and autumn seem to have been at his disposal as far as theatrical performances were concerned, during the first seven or eight years of his career. In 1597 he bought "all that capital messuage or tenement in Stratford, In 1602 he made a large adcalled the New Place." dition to his property at Stratford, by the purchase of a hundred and seventy acres of arable land, and also a house in Stratford, situated in Walker-street. he purchased another messuage in Stratford, Barne's In 1605 he accomplished a gardens and orchards. large purchase of the moiety of the lease of the great There could be no and small tithes of Stratford. doubt from these circumstances, and from documents that show that he dealt in corn, that he was a cultivator of his own land in his native place. At what period he entirely gave up his profession of an actor it We believe it was earlier in the is difficult to say. seventeenth century than is commonly imagined. There can be no doubt that for several years previous to his death, he had returned, wealthy and honoured, to the bosom of those who were dearest to him-his wife and daughters, his mother, his sisters and brothers. The companions of his boyhood are all around him. They have been useful members of society in their native place. He has constantly kept up his intercourse with them. They have looked to him for assistance in their difficulties. He is come to be one of them, to dwell wholly amongst them, to take a deeper