prudent of poets and men, and left rare old Ben to enjoy life for another score of years.

DELINA.-A wretched piece of village gossip, unheard of till half a century after his death. Shakespeare's will is dated a month before that, which in itself justifies the inference that his death was far from sudden. I conceive of him there, surrounded by his weeping wife, his daughters and sons-in-law, calmly dictating that simple confession of faith of England's greatest poet: "I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting."

HARDEN.-Poh! a mere lawyer's formula. Picture him rather-as Malone says, with his weeping Anne at his bed side, cutting her off—not indeed with a shilling, but an old bed! The simple truth is your wise poet made as foolish a marriage as ever ruined a man's prospects for life; repented of it when too late; and so forsook her, for London and the choice society of such clever rakes as you speak of.

DELINA. The choice society, ere long, of the young Earl of Southampton, of the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, as well as of Raleigh, Jonson, Drayton, Beaumont, Fletcher, and others of nature's peerage. The idea that Shakespeare-the calm, the wise, the gentle Shakespeare,-thrust into a formal testamentary document, set forth otherwise with such solemn earnestness, a poor insult to the wife of his youth, and the mother of his children, is too preposterous to be seriously entertained. Charles Knight has dealt with that scandal long ago. With all the gravity of Dr. Dryasdust himself, he gives you Coke upon Littleton to show that the best bed was an heirloom due by custom to the heir at law, and therefore not to be bequeathed; that Shakespeare's widow-an heiress in her own right, had an ample dower from his land

ed estate, and that the bequest, on which you would put so vile a construction, was really a substantial mark of respect according to the usage of that seventeenth century.

HARDEN. You don't mean to pretend that you fancy Shakespeare ever looked otherwise than with irritation and disgust on the woman who took advantage of his youth and inexperience to beguile him into so preposterous a misalliance?

DELINA. Shakespeare's marriage with Anne Hathaway was no misalliance, She was of gentle blood; and in her greater maturity suited the precocious genius of the young poet. I don't mean to deny that there is a certain amount of imprudence,folly if you will,—in the marriage of a youth of eighteen to a young woman seven years his senior. But I have frequently noted the preference shown by thoughtful, gifted youths, to women considerably their seniors. If it were not for the prudence of the ladies, such alliances would be commoner than they are. Young Shakespeare probably found a wise counsellor, a sagacious critic, a discriminating admirer of "the first heirs of his invention," in Anne Hathaway, before either thought of anything but the pleasure of congenial society.

HARDEN. Found in Anne Hathaway a wise counsellor! found in her a designing baggage, who took advantage of his youth to as well nigh ruin all his prospects for life as ever woman did since Adam's

DELINA.-Come! come! You don't mean to make out her whom Milton styles "the fairest of her daughters,”—our good mother Eve, the senior of her husband by seven years! But, to be serious; remember you, if there is one point more than all others, in which Shakespeare surpasses his contemporaries, it is in his delineation of woman.

HARDEN. And, if I remember rightly, one of the earliest of these delineations is "the wondrous qualities and mild behaviour" of Kate the Shrew !

wife.

HARDEN. And so must we fancy did Anne Hathaway; but I rather fancy both Petruchio and "our pleasant Willy,"-as Spenser calls him,—found themselves most comfortable when their charmers were a hundred miles off. Shakespeare at least put the road to London between them, and once there, it is not hard to find what he thought of young men marrying old wives.

DELINA.—Where, I pray you, does he ever allude to his marriage? The very marvel of Shakespeare's dramas is that, with perhaps the solitary exception of "the dozen white luces" in Justice Shallow's coat-armour, and the Welshman's blundering travesty of it for the benefit of the “old coat" of the Lucys of Charlecote, there is not a personality

noticeable in his whole writings.

HARDEN.-I said nothing about personalities. But what say you to the allusion in "Midsummer Night's Dream"? That is one of his earliest comedies, you must be aware; and contains interesting traces of the goings on in his own Warwickshire neighbourhood when he was a boy.

"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."

There surely spoke the poet's own personal experience. You don't fancy he jumped to his knowledge of human character and motives by intuition, and with his eyes shut.

DELINA. By intuition, I do verily be lieve; though certainly not with his eyes

shut.

HARDEN. Well, but listen again. The Duke goes on thus :—

"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."

If you can get over that there is no use reasoning with you.

DELINA. Nay; let us hear Viola's reply; remembering that she is a youth, a "boy," as the Duke calls her,-young Shakespeare, let us suppose.

"And so they are," she says,

"Alas that they are so ; To die, even when they to perfection grow!"

I don't think that chimes in very aptly with your theory of Shakespeare as the repentant Benedict, pillorying his own folly "for daws to peck at."

HARDEN. You will never persuade me that Shakespeare is not there putting his own experience to use, as one who had committed the very folly he warns against.

call "Fortune's dearest spite?" Was there no place but Stratford where the prosperous poet could buy himself lands, and write himself gentleman? Had London and "The Mermaid," with Raleigh, and Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and all the rest of them, no attractions? As to the story of his flight from Stratford a disgraced man, there is not a tittle of evidence in its support; unless you think Walter Savage Landor, and his inimitable trial scene, good contemporary authority. Critics have been deceived with less excuse.

HARDEN.-Well! Well! I'll grant you, he never sneered at the Shallows, or made sport of "the dozen white louses" which so became the Knight of Charlecote's old coat! There are no Dogberrys in his plays! It is all a much-ado-about-nothing, this talk of youthful escapades. He loved a Justice, as Falstaff would have certified, better than "a Windsor stag, the fattest in the Forest."

DELINA. Nay, but let us consider it seriously. Can you produce nothing more to the point than what you have yet advanced? If you are to credit Shakespeare with all the sentiments of his dramatic characters, you will indeed make him " not one, but all mankind's epitome." What say you to his Katherine, in Henry VIII.? If she and the bluff Tudor were misgraffed in respect of years," the poet went out of his way as a courtier at least,-when he made of her a model wife.

66

HARDEN. You go wide afield, indeed, if Harry the Eighth is your model husband. But I still venture to think I have already advanced some pretty apt passages. Can you match them with one in support of your view from Henry VIII., or that other view-from pattern husband, Othello, or Crookback Richard, or Hamlet's uncle, or Benedict himself? Let us have it, no matter where you cull it from.

DELINA. I grant you, the demand is a hard one. Gladly would we recover, if we

could, some clue to the personal history of this, the greatest of poets, and as I believe, the greatest of men. But his very dramatic power arises from the objective character of his mind. His was, moreover, too healthy and masculine a nature for morbid introversions of the Byronic type. But if anywhere an autobiographic glimpse is to be looked for, it is in his "sugared sonnets,”—as Meres calls them,-some of which were doubtless among the earliest productions of his muse.

HARDEN. When you can make any sense out of that incomprehensible riddle. with which some wiseacre introduced his sonnets to the world; and tell us who "The onlie Begetter of these insuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H." is, to whom "The well-wishing Adventurer in setting forth, T. T., wisheth that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet?" it will be time enough to solve the remainder of the mystical puzzle. But what of the Sonnets? I thought the critics were pretty well agreed that the "Laura" of our Petrarchian sonneteer was one of the rougher sex. I have looked into them sufficiently carefully, myself, to know that Anne Hathaway's name is not to be found in the whole hundred and fifty-four. DELINA. away may be. Sonnet :

Perhaps not. Yet Anne Hath-
Wordsworth says of the

"With this key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart." HARDEN. And you still persuade yourself Anne had a place there?

DELINA. I am more certain she had a place in Shakespeare's heart than in his Sonnets; for they resemble in their general character, other well-known collections of the time, by Daniel, Constable, Spenser and Drayton; and were, as Meres tells us, first circulated in manuscript among his private friends. Too much has been attempted to be made out of them. Some undoubtedly express the poet's own feelings. deal with fanciful loves and jealousies; or

Others

dwell on the personal experiences of friends. But there, if anywhere, we have some insight into the inner life of the poet. You know the fine one where he chides Fortune: "That did not better for my life provide,

Than public means, which public manners breed." Petrarchian Sonnets, I am well aware, are sufficiently intangible things. I have tried to extract autobiographical material out of those of Wyatt and Surrey, as well as of Spenser and know it to be something like getting sunbeams out of cucumbers! Still some of the Sonnets of Shakespeare immediately succeeding that lament over his banishment from the favourite haunts of his boyhood's and lover's days, seem to me to acquire a fine significance as addressed to

his absent wife ::

"Alas! why, fearing of Time's tyranny,

Might I not then say, 'Now I love you best,'
When I was certain o'er incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?
Love is a babe; then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow?"

Fancy the young husband dwelling, in his absence, on the one disparity between them, of which officious friends would not fail to make the most, and so writing :

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."

HARDEN. You are ingenious, I own; but you will admit that a score of other applications could be, and indeed have already been made to appear equally apt.

DELINA. I am well aware of the perplexity the Sonnets have occasioned to critic and biographer; and of the fashion in which some have dogmatized about them. Chalmers had no doubt they were addressed to the maiden Queen! Dr. Gervinus, of Heidelberg, is not less certain that they are all, without exception addressed to Mr. W. H. This indeed he pronounces to be "quite indubitable"; only he thinks Mr. W. H. was

not Mr. W. H., but a mystification for the Earl of Southampton-an idea of old date. Tyrwhitt, Farmer, Steevens, Malone, and others of the antiquarian type, only differ as to who the man was on whom Shakespeare expended all this amatory verse; while Mr. Armitage Brown thinks they are not sonnets at all, but stanzas of some half dozen continuous poems to a friend and a mistress. Shakespeare had a nephew, William Hart, the son of his sister Joan. He had a patron William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom his literary executors dedicated his dramatic works, as one to whom their author owed much favour while living. There was a William Hughes in Shakespeare's time; and one of the Dr. Dryasdusts-Tyrwhitt, I think,-made the grand discovery of his name in the twentieth sonnet, disguised under a pun bad enough to have been the death of old Sam. Johnson:

"A man in hue all Hews in his controlling!"

Dr. Drake, another of the wiseacres, finds that Lord Southampton's name was Henry

Wriothsley.-H. W., if not W. H.-and so thinks he has found the mystical initials of the dedication; only reversed for the purpose of concealment; and so we get back to the idea fathered so unhesitatingly by the Heidelberg Professor, and are no wiser than when we set out.

HARDEN. Truly it is rather a narrow foundation to build a hypothesis upon; as Lovel said when called in as umpire in the famous Pictish controversy at Monkbarns.

DELINA. Not a whit, not a whit, say I, with the redoubted Oldbuck; men fight best in a narrow ring; and any one may see as far as his neighbour through a millstone,

provided only it has a hole in the middle! HARDEN.-Pray then what do you believe about these same Sonnets and their only begetter? Steevens has pronounced them to be too bad for even the genius of their author to make tolerable; beyond even the power of an Act of Parliament