Hart, a hatter in her native town; and Edmund, the youngest of the family, adopting the profession of an actor, resided in St. Savior's parish in London; and was buried in St. Savior's Church, on the last day of December, 1607, in his twenty-eighth year. Of Anne and Richard, whose births intervened between those of Joan and Edmund, the parish register tells the whole history, when it records that the former was buried on the 4th of April, 1579, in the eighth year of her age, and the latter on the 4th of February, 1612-13, when he had nearly completed his thirty-ninth.

In consequence of a document, discovered in the year 1770, in the house in which, if tradition is to be trusted, our Poet was born, some persons have concluded that John Shakspeare was a Roman Catholic, though he had risen, by the regular gradation of office, to the chief dignity of the corporation of Stratford, that of high bailiff; and, during the whole of this period, had unquestionably conformed to the rites of the Church of England. The asserted fact seemed not to be very probable; and the document in question, which, drawn up in a testamentary form, and regularly attested, zealously professes the Roman faith of him in whose name it speaks, having been subjected to a rigid examination by Malone, has been pronounced to be spurious. The trade of John Shakspeare, as well as his religious faith, has recently been made the subject of controversy. According to the testimony of Rowe, grounded on the tradition of Stratford, the father of our Poet was a dealer in wool, or, in the provincial vocabulary of his country, a wool-driver; and such he has been deemed by all the biographers of his son, till the fact was thrown into doubt by the result of the inquisitiveness of Malone. Finding, in an old and obscure MS. purporting to record the proceedings of the bailiff's court in Stratford, our John Shakspeare designated as a glover, Malone exults over the ignorance of poor Rowe, and assumes no small degree of merit to himself as the discoverer of a long-sought and a most important historic truth. If he had recollected the remark of the clown in the Twelfth Night,* that "a sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outwards!"

*Act iii. sc. 1.

-he would, doubtless, have pressed the observation into his service, and brought it as an irresistible attestation of the veracity of his old MS.

Whatever may have been the trade of John Shakspeare, whether that of wool-merchant or of glover, it seems, with the little fortune of his wife, to have placed him in a state of easy competence. In 1569 or 1570, in consequence partly of his alliance with the Ardens, and partly of his attainment of the prime municipal honors of his town, he obtained a concession of arms from the herald's office-a grant which placed him and his family on the file of the gentry of England; and, in 1574, he purchased two houses, with gardens and orchards annexed to them, in Henley Street, in Stratford. But before the year 1578, his prosperity, from causes not now ascertainable, had certainly declined; for in that year, as we find from the records of his borough, he was excused, in condescension to his poverty, from the moiety of a very moderate assessment of six shillings and eight pence, made by the members of the corporation on themselves; at the same time that he was altogether exempted from his contribution to the relief of the poor. During the remaining years of his life, his fortunes appear not to have recovered themselves; for he ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation hall, where he had once presided; and, in 1586, another person was substituted as alderman in his place, in consequence of his magisterial inefficiency. He died in the September of 1601, when his illustrious son had already attained to high celebrity; and his wife, Mary Shakspeare, surviving him for seven years, deceased in the September of 1608, the burial of the former being registered on the eighth, and that of the latter on the ninth of this month, in each of these respective years.

On the 30th of June, 1564, when our Poet had not yet been three months in this breathing world, his native Stratford was visited by the plague; and, during the six succeeding months, the ravaging disease is calculated to have swept to the grave more than a seventh part of the whole population of the place. But the favored infant reposed in security in his cradle, and breathed health amid an atmosphere of pestilence. The Genius of England may be supposed to have held the arm of the destroyer, and not to have permitted it to fall on the consecrated dwelling of his and Nature's darling.

The disease, indeed, did not overstep his charmed threshold; for the name of Shakspeare is not to be found in the register of deaths throughout that period of accelerated mortality. That he survived this desolating calamity of his townsmen, is all that we know of William Shakspeare from the day of his birth till he was sent, as we are informed by Rowe, to the free-school of Stratford; and was stationed there in the course of his education, till, in consequence of the straitened circumstances of his father, he was recalled to the paternal roof. As we are not told at what age he was sent to school, we cannot form any estimate of the time during which he remained there; but if he was placed under his master when he was six years old, he might have continued in a state of instruction for seven or even for eight years-a term sufficiently long for any boy, not an absolute blockhead, to acquire something more than the mere elements of the classical languages. We are too ignorant, however, of dates, in these instances, to speak with any confidence on the subject; and we can only assert that seven or eight of the fourteen years, which intervened between the birth of our Poet in 1564 and the known period of his father's diminished fortune in 1578, might very properly have been given to the advantages of the free-school. But now the important question is to be asked-What were the attainments of our young Shakspeare at this seat of youthful instruction? Did he return to his father's house in a state of utter ignorance of classic literature? or was he as far advanced in his school-studies as boys of his age (which I take to be thirteen or fourteen) usually are in the common progress of our public and more reputable schools? That his scholastic attainments did not rise to the point of learning, seems to have been the general opinion of his contemporaries; and to this opinion I am willing to assent. But I cannot persuade myself that he was entirely unacquainted with the classic tongues; or that, as Farmer and his followers labor to convince us, he could receive the instructions, even for three or four years, of a school of any character, and could then depart without any knowledge beyond that of the Latin accidence. The most accomplished scholar may read with pleasure the poetic versions of the classic poets; and the less advanced proficient may consult his indolence by applying to the page of a translation of a prose classic, when accuracy of quotation

may not be required; and on evidences of this nature is supported the charge which has been brought, and which is now generally admitted, against our immortal Bard, of more than school-boy ignorance. He might, indeed, from necessity apply to North for the interpretation of Plutarch; but he read Golding's Ovid only, as I am satisfied, for the entertainment of its English poetry. Ben Jonson, who must have been intimately conversant with his friend's classic acquisitions, tells us expressly that "He had small Latin, and less Greek." But, according to the usual plan of instruction in our schools, he must have traversed a considerable extent of the language of Rome, before he could touch even the confines of that of Greece. He must in short have read Ovid's Metamorphoses, and a part at least of Virgil, before he could open the grammar of the more ancient, and copious, and complex dialect. This I conceive to be a fair statement of the case in the question respecting Shakspeare's learning. Beyond controversy he was not a scholar; but he had not profited so little by the hours which he had passed in school, as not to be able to understand the more easy Roman authors without the assistance of a translation. If he himself had been asked, on the subject, he might have parodied his own Falstaff, and have answered, "Indeed I am not a Scaliger or a Budæus, but yet no blockhead, friend." I believe also that he was not wholly unacquainted with the popular languages of France and Italy. He had abundant leisure to acquire them; and the activity and the curiosity of his mind were sufficiently strong to urge him to their acquisition. But to discuss this much-agitated question, would lead me beyond the limits which are prescribed to me; and, contenting myself with declaring that, in my opinion, both parties are wrong, both they who contend for our Poet's learning, and they who place his illiteracy on a level with that of John Taylor, the celebrated water poet, I must resume my humble and most deficient narrative. The classical studies of William Shakspeare, whatever progress he may or may not have made in them, were now suspended; and he was replaced in his father's house, when he had attained his thirteenth or fourteenth year, to assist with his hand in the maintenance of the family. Whether he continued in this situation whilst he remained in his single state, has not been told to us, and cannot therefore, at this period, be known. But in the absence of informa

tion, conjecture will be busy, and will soon cover the bare desert with unprofitable vegetation. Whilst Malone surmises that the young Poet passed the interval, till his marriage, or a large portion of it, in the office of an attorney, Aubrey stations him, during the same term, at the head of a country school. But the surmises of Malone are not universally happy; and to the assertions of Aubrey I am not disposed to attach more credit than was attached to them by Anthony Wood, who knew the old gossip, and was competent to appreciate his character. It is more probable that the necessity which brought young Shakspeare from his school, retained him with his father's occupation at home, till the acquisition of a wife made it convenient for him to remove to a separate habitation. It is reasonable to conclude that a mind like his, ardent, excursive, and "all compact of imagination," would not be satisfied with entire inactivity, but would obtain knowledge where it could, if not from the stores of the ancients, from those at least which were supplied to him by the writers of his own country.

In 1582, before he had completed his eighteenth year, he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter, as Rowe informs us, of a substantial yeoman in the neighborhood of Stratford. We are unacquainted with the precise period of their marriage, and with the church in which it was solemnized; for in the register of Stratford there is no record of the event; and we are made certain of the year in which it occurred only by the baptism of Susannah, the first produce of the union, on the 26th of May, 1583. As young Shakspeare neither increased his fortune by this match, though he probably received some money with his wife, nor raised himself by it in the community, we may conclude that he was induced to it by inclination, and the impulse of love. But the youthful poet's dream of happiness does not seem to have been realized by the result. The bride was eight years older than the bridegroom; and whatever charms she might possess to fascinate the eyes of her boy-lover, she probably was deficient in those powers which are requisite to impose a durable fetter on the heart, and to hold "in sweet captivity" a mind of the very highest order. No charge is intimated against the lady; but she is left in Stratford by her husband during his long residence in the metropolis; and on his death, she is found to be only slightly, and, as it were, casually, remembered in his will. Her second