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Thank you, no, I am in a hurry."

Most people would be glad of the chance." "Yes, yes," said Stumf, "but then I am not most people. By the way, your boy is in my cart below, and is anxious for a drive; may he go with me?

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"Yes, and I would give you a blessing if I had one, for your kindness to him; there go, I'm busy."

Taking him at his word Stumf crept down the oaken stair, and at the portal found a cart waiting, a rude country cart, and in it, glibly talking to the mare, a tall slender fellow, who was no other than the idiot son of the tormentor, grown to be a man.

Klaus had grown to be a man in stature, but his senses, early frighted by some horrible specimen of butchery, had fled away never to return, and he was still the witless child that had followed Father Anselmo-like a dog -sixteen years before.

He shouted merrily when he saw Stumf, and cried out:

"Old Joan and I"-Old Joan was the marewere almost quarrelling; you must know that

I have a mind to go round by the hollow, and Joan has a mind to go round by the mill; sly Joan knows the shortest route and swears by her four legs she'll take it."

Stumf climbed heavily into the cart. "Never mind Joan," he said, "if you want to go round by the mill, Klaus, round by the mill we go. Joan is far too good-humoured to grumble, but the supper will be spoiling.” "What's for supper?

"Your favourite dish."

"Good! Joan shall have it her own way round by the hollow."

So they cantered off at a brisk pace, and the full-orbed moon came out with her attendant stars, and Klaus sang and whistled and shouted and made merry in his wild way. They left the city far behind, and were dashing rapidly along a country lane that overlooked a broad dyke, where the moon looked down on her fair image, when suddenly Klaus cried out-

"See, master, what is that before us?" He trembled and caught hold of Stumf. "What is it ?-send it away."

"It is nothing," answered Stumf, "and how shall I send away that?"

"Nothing! look there-there!" And Stumf looked and saw it also.

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THE HE reign of Queen Elizabeth-good Queen Bess-has been called the golden age. And not without reason. It was a period in English history famous for the great men it produced. It was as if nature had hoarded her wealth to glorify the reign of the last of the Tudors. The age of Queen Elizabeth was pre-eminently that of romance. The voices of the Reformers had awakened many a slumbering intellect, and quickened many a manly heart. Great thoughts had been let loose; great thoughts, which were to live, registered in printer's ink-for printing had come, with its worldwide blessings, and scattered knowledge far

and wide. It was an age of wonder, of adventure, and of action. British hearts were then, as now, fond of the sea. It had especial charms for our countrymen. Raleigh, with his wondrous stories of far-off lands, had captivated all hearts. Citizens talked of the mountains of gold which lay ready for the spoiler in the new world. 'Prentices began to count time a sorry laggard, who would not budge a step more fast to free them from their toils of 'prenticeship, that they might win fame, and honour, and glory, on the ocean wave. People heard, with credulous astonishment of a country where the people walked about with

their heads under their arms. Stout and brave were Englishmen, nothing daunted by the threats of Spain-though, by the way, Spain was a colossal power, and the mistress of the seas-yet, old England had sons who loved so well

"The jewel set in the silver sea," that they were willing to do all things, and dare all things for her sake. Spain had tried invasion, and had failed. Elizabeth, the heroine of Tilbury, was well-beloved by her people, and Englishmen and Englishwomen rejoiced in the daughter of old King Hal.

We said it was an age of romance; and so it was. England was proud of her statesmen and philosophers. Men praised the names of Bacon and of Burleigh. England gloried in her enterprising captains, and did due honour to Raleigh and to Drake. But England did not forget in action and adventure, in profundities and policy, her children of romance and poetry, and admiring multitudes sympathized with Desdemona's fate-with the loves of Romeo and Juliet; with the sorrows of Lear, and the speculations of Hamlet; they listened to every moral which fell from the philosophizing Jacques, and shouted with every laugh that rang from Falstaff--and in doing this, they did not forget to honour the wizard, who, with his wand of poetical enchantment, had brought forth these creatures of his fancy. And not only then, but now, as long as ever the English language lasts, will the name of that great man be honoured; for Englishmen were, and are, and ever will be, justly proud of WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

what avail was it to the ex-bailiff, to know that he once had five hundred pounds, good sterling money from the good queen's mint, if now, when a distress was issued against him for five pounds, the answer was "no effects." What could he do, poor undone man that he was? How could his single arm ward off the blow that was crushing him to the earth? How could he, unaided, fight this hard battle with circumstances?

He had a family of eight children, and his means would not allow him to educate any of them with a view to their rising above the level of their present position in society. Even his well-loved William,-little Will, as they called him, of whom gossips had predicted wondrous things, seeing that he was born upon St. George's day,-poor little Will, whose life had once been quite despaired of, for the plague, the raging, burning plague, with its red-hot carbuncles-had swept over Stratford, and lain many a man and woman low; the plague, which had settled alike upon the lord and groundling, and summoned both away, and given to my lord no more than six feet of good English earth-the plague had fallen upon the family of John Shakspeare, and his little son had sickened, and almost died.

At the usual age he was placed at the Free Grammar School of Stratford. His stay there was but short, on account of his father's increasing difficulties, yet long enough to gain that "little Latin and less Greek" which Ben Jonson afterwards described as his classical

attainments.

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The materials for a life-history of Shaks- On leaving school, William Shakspeare was peare are comparatively scanty. From sundry for a long time at home with his father, who public documents of the town of Stratford-on- at that period carried on the business of a Avon, in Warwickshire, it appears, that the butcher. An old writer (Aubrey) tells us, Shakspeares were a numerous family in that that Shakspeare assisted in his father's busicounty. One of the biographers of the greatness, and that when he killed a calf he bard says, that the Shakspeares were of good would do it in a high style, and make a figure and fashion then, and are mentioned as speech." gentlemen; but this is scarcely the fact. The fame of Shakspeare needs no pride of ancestry to make it more widely known or more fully appreciated. His ancestors were men of respectability; some as tradesmen, some as farmers, but they were by no means esteemed the gentry of the neighbourhood.

John Shakspeare was an industrious and frugal tradesman, in the town of Stratford-onAvon. He was first a glover, then a butcher, and subsequently a wool-stapler. At one period he was worth five hundred poundsand in days of yore, five hundred pounds was a considerable fortune. After filling the subordinate offices with honour and credit, he was elected high bailiff of Stratford. This was a high honour-the highest the borough could bestow. No wonder, that as chief magistrate of Stratford, he should woo and win a certain Miss Arden, and having married her, should obtain from the Heralds' College a grant of arms, with permission to impale his own achievements with those of the Ardens."

But this prosperity was too bright to last, a cloud shut out his sunshine; there was a great decay of trade in the town, and its effects were felt in the home of John Shakspeare.

Slowly, but surely, poverty came on. Of

But even to the mind of Shakspeare there was a greater pleasure than that of doing business in the shambles. When bands of strolling players came to the town, his heart leaped up with pleasure. He had an admiration of the drama-a poor weakly business in those days, with very little to admire in it, but enough to kindle in the mind of the future poet the flame of enthusiasm.

And this business of butchering was certainly distasteful to the young bard. Before he was eighteen he grew weary of it, and became, according to one authority, a lawyer's clerk, and according to another a schoolmaster. In whichever capacity he served matters but little, and whether training the minds of a future generation and exercising the authority of the pedagogue, or copying out cases and quoting precedents for the lawyer, depend upon it he did it well. Lord Campbell has shown that he possessed an excellent knowledge of the law; intuitively, however, he seems to have understood everything. He went into business as a woolstapler, and was doing well; but falling in with convivial companions, not over scrupulous, he went out poaching one dark night on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy. By some

means or other it was made known to the squire that Shakspeare was guilty, and forthwith Lucy the irascible instituted a prosecution, and drove the deer-stalking youngster up to London, after the penning of some doggrel verses which he affixed to the gates of the baronet's park.

London! the grand refuge of the necessitous ! London! the hope of the endangered-the fairy city to those who know it not-the place of wealth and power, where honour and glory wait but the coming of men who choose to have them! London, with its thousand streams of life, its hopes and fears, and joys and sorrows, its battles, its triumphis, its defeats; London, the city whither every man goes to make his fortune, as if it were the great manufactory of honour and success, and (the very mint-house of the world! To London, Shakspeare came, to begin his career of renown, driven into greatness by the deer-stalking prosecution of the Warwickshire squire!

Westminster; thither came the citizens from the Chepe; thither came 'prentices, and the gallants of Paul's Walk; early, too, came they, to occupy the best benches, which the place afforded; for, says an old writer of that period

"They to theatres were pleased to come

Ere they had dined, to take up the best room." Shakspeare was never anything more than a mere subordinate in the play-acting department. He could play such characters as the ghost in his own Hamlet. His highest pay as an actor never exceeded six and eightpence a week-a sum equal to about seven and twenty shillings of our present money.

ButShakspeare appears to have found a source of remunerative employment in adapting the plays of playwrights for the stage. Encouraged by his success in this humble department, he gradually became a dramatic writer on his own account. Not without misgiving, not without The English drama was at that time in its a fear of failure, not without a palpitating infancy. Three years before Queen Elizabeth heart as lords and groundlings sat in judgment had formed the first licensed company of on his play. What play that was, is now a players, among whom Burbage the chief trage- subject of dispute. Say some it was the Middian, and Greene the principal comedian, and a summer Night's Dream, the beautiful story of few others, were natives of Warwickshire. Oberon and Titania; others, it was surely the Greene, a dramatist as well as a player, was a Comedy of Errors; say others, 'twas the native of Stratford, related to Shakspeare, and Taming of the Shrew; or, if not this, Love's had probably been his early companion. On Labour Lost. No matter which; the play at being obliged to quit Stratford, Shakspeare all events succeeded, and the poet was enseems to have been invited by Greene to Lon-couraged to proceed. But it seems that the don and to have been by him introduced as an actor at the Blackfriars Theatre. From the circumstances it is to be presumed that the genius of Skakspeare had begun to stir within him. The deer-stalking, the writing of the ballad, and the change of a humble profession for that of the stage, all appear to denote a mind that was not to be limited to a tame and ordinary

career.

With his mind already much inclined towards thestage, it was natural enough that Shakspeare, on arriving in London without visible means of subsistence, and most probably with a purse by no means too plenteously stored, should turn his attention to the theatre as the place in which to earn the means of existence-at that time, very probably, his highest aim. Some of his biographers represent him as being, on his arrival in London, so extremely low in circumstances as to be fain to hold gentlemen's horses during the performance. Considering his former position, his predilection for the theatre, and his acquaintance with some of the performers, it is not likely that this is true. It is much more probable that he, in the first instance, attached himself to the theatre as a sort of underling of all work; now going on as a mute member of a pageant, anon acting the useful though not the very dignified part of call-boy.

The theatres were at that time far different places from what they are now. There were two or three on the Southwark side of the Thames-the Globe, the Rose, &c., and one at Blackfriars. They were generally circular buildings; the performance commenced at one o'clock in the day, and a flag was hoisted from the roof to give notice that the acting was going on. Thither came the lordlings from

recompense for his deathless productions was at the first but small, and we find him writing in the humblest style of entreaty to the manager for the loan of five shillings.

Fortunately for him, his fame and his reward did not depend upon the fickleness of managers. The nobility of that age valued themselves upon the possession of a literary taste. They patronized poetry. Shakspeare found a friend in Lord Southampton, who, though only twenty years of age, thought himself proud in having such a friend as Shakspeare. Though Southampton was the chief, he was by no means the sole patron of Shakspeare; the earls of Montgomery and Pembroke, and several other noblemen, greatly served him, and Elizabeth, the queen, became his friend.

Though Elizabeth had plays privately performed before her at her courts, paying from £6. 13s. 4d. to £10 for the actors' attendance, she would sometimes sit behind the scenes at the theatre during the performance of any of her especially favourite plays. On one of these occasions, Shakspeare was performing the part of a king, and while he was on the stage her Majesty passed across it to take her seat, and, falling in with the business of the scene made a profound obeisance to Shakspeare. He did not suffer even the condescension of Majesty to withdraw his attention from the part he was enacting. When his business in the scene was at an end, and he was on the point of making his exit, her Majesty again crossed the stage, and, as she did so, dropped her glove so immediately before him, that he could not avoid seeing it. Without an instant's hesitation, but as if the words were veritably part and parcel of the speech he was just concluding, he said

"And though now bent on this high embassy,

Yet stoop we to pick up our cousin's glove;" and raising it from the ground, he presented it, behind the scenes, to the Queen, who highly complimented him upon his ready invention and presence of mind.

Much has been said about some quarrel, or rather some rankling animosity, between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. Many were the wit combats between them. Ben Jonson, like a Spanish galleon, was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performance. Shakspeare, like the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, and take advantage of all words by the quickness of his wit and invention.*

Malone has an anecdote, which strongly corroborates our opinion that the disputes and bickerings of these two great men were precisely of the above description. In the course of one of their conversations, some doubts were started as to the merits of the motto of the Globe Theatre. It was, Totus mundus agit histrionem," which may be freely translaten by the very words of Shakspeare himself

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"All the world's a stage;

And all the men and women in it players."

The name of Shakspeare appears in a petition, which the proprietors and players of the Blackfriars Theatre addressed, in 1599, to the Privy Council, for leave to rebuild that place of entertainment, which had fallen into disrepair. Towards the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign, Shakspeare rose up to be a man of consequence; and in the first year of the reign of King James I. he obtained from that monarch a patent for playing at the Globe Theatre in summer, and at the Blackfriars Theatre in the winter. About the same time he purchased a house in his native town for £50. In 1605 he paid £400 for the lease of a moiety of the great and small tithes of Stratford. Three years later, when the city proposed to buy up the Blackfriars Theatre, in order to put an end to what they considered a nuisance, Shakspeare is found to have asked £500' for the wardrobe and properties; and for his four shares the same as his fellows Burbage and Fletcher, namely £933. 6s. 8d. As the shares were twenty in number, Shakspeare must be presumed to have enjoyed a fifth of the property of the house. His whole income at that time is calculated to have been about £300 annually, a sum equal to about £1,500 of our present money.

In these latter years of his life Shakspeare had conciliated the affection of his most estimable associates by the benevolent sociality of his disposition. Aubrey says, "He was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant and smooth wit." Ben Jonson says, "I loved the man, I do honour to his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent fancy, brave notions, gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that

* Fuller.

sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."

In 1613 or 1614 he withdrew from all connection with the theatre, and retired to his native place. There he busied himself with the management of his lands; and it was probably at that period he planted with his own hands the mulberry-tree which was so long an object of reverent admiration to the kindred intellects who crowded from all quarters to see it and the other interesting objects connected with Shakspeare. He died on his fifty-second birthday, 1616.

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In his will, which was very long, and dated only a month before his death, he made considerable difference in the bequests made to his daughters. To Judith he left only a hundred and fifty pounds certain, another hundred and fifty on the contingency of her living three years from the date of his will, and a silver bowl; while to Susannah he left copyhold tenement and appurtenances, parcel of the manor of Rowington; New Place, with its appurtenances; two messuages or tene-ments with their appurtenances, situated in Henley-street;" and all his "barns, stables, orchards, gardens, lands, tenements, and hereditaments whatever, situate, lying, being, &c., within the towns, hamlets, villages, fields, and grounds, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopston, and Welcombe, or in any of them in the said county of Warwick; also all that messuage or tenement with its appurtenances wherein dwelleth one John Robinson, situate, lying, &c., near the Wardrobe, Blackfriars, London, and all my other lands, tenements, and hereditaments whatsoever." bequest to this "well tochered" lady, who was married to a Dr Hall, a physician, did not even end here. Having so bountifully provided her with landed property, he further gave her all his "goods, chattels, leases, plate, jewels, and household stuff whatsoever."

His

Poor Hamnet was dead. The difference between the bequests to the two sisters has never been explained. His sole bequest to his wife, which seems to show that early difference had ripened into almost hatred, was his "second

best bed."

And they laid him down in his last sleep beneath the north chancel of Stratford church. A flag-stone covers his grave, and on it is inscribed

"Good friend! for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here;

Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."
It is unnecessary to dwell upon his writings.
To attempt to criticize would be out of place.
Their chronology is uncertain, but what of
that? The sparkling store of wit and fancy is
none the less alluring, none the less enchanting,
on that account. What wonderful creations
were those of his! They rise up before us a
great host to whom he has given a "local habi-
tation and a name." Here is Falstaff, with
laughter that seems to pour from him in
floods; here the melancholy Jacques; here
the three weird sisters, so withered and so wild
in their attire; here Ariel, and Caliban, and
Titania under the green boughs; and Malvolio
with his crossed garters; and the solemn

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