A FAMILY of the name of Shakespeare—pronounced, it would seem, Shaksper—was numerous in Warwickshire during the middle ages. About the middle of the sixteenth century John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, a farmer residing at Snitterfield in that county, was settled at Stratford-on-Avon, and was—though it appears he could neither read nor write—a leading member of the Corporation. Various accounts are given of his trade and occupation. We have proof that in 1556 he was a glover; he was afterwards a farmer or yeoman; Aubrey says he was a butcher; and according to Rowe, he was "a considerable dealer in wool." He would seem in fact to have been one who was ready to turn to any honest occupation by which money might be made.

In 1557 John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote, a man of good landed property, and belonging to a family of no mean note in the county of Warwick. By her he had either eight or ten children, of whom we need only notice William, the third, who was baptized April 26th, 1564; but the exact date of his birth is unknown. As his father was a member of the Corporation, it is highly probable that, as Rowe asserts, he was sent to the Free School of the town. How long he continued at it, and what he learned there, are matters on which we have no certain information. He had probably an ordinary English education, and he certainly, as his writings show, had learned some Latin; but he does not seem to have got beyond the elementary books, and of Greek, if it was taught in the school, he learned nothing whatever. We are told by one authority that he acted as an assistant in the school; by another that his father took him away early to assist in his own business of wool-stapling or, as the former, namely Aubrey, says, of butchering, who adds that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech,"—of course a mere figment. Malone conjectures—and in my opinion not without a show of probability—from the frequent occurrence of law-terms in his dramas, and his correct appreciation of their meaning, that he may have been for some time in the office of an attorney in Stratford. This, however, is all uncertainty; but at all events, judging from the turn of his mind, I should be inclined to say that, beside his accurate observation of men and manners, he read all the books he could obtain in his native town.

In the registry of the diocese of Worcester is preserved a document bearing date November 28, 1582, securing the Bishop against injury in the case of his licensing certain persons to be married with once asking of the banns. These persons are William Shakespeare, then in his nineteenth year, and Anne Hathaway, then apparently aged twenty-six years; for she died in 1623 at the age of sixty-seven years: she was therefore about eight years her husband's senior. When their marriage was celebrated we are unable to learn; but the baptism of Susanna, their first child, took place on the 26th of May, 1583, just six months after the date of the document quoted above. The natural inference is obvious. Shakespeare, like Burns, knew his wife before the law had made her his; and, like him, he acted honourably towards her.

This, perhaps the only imprudent act of Shakespeare's life, has been variously judged. Nothing, we know, is more common than for young men to fall in love with women older than themselves; and among the class of society to which both parties belonged, instances were, and are, not uncommon of the rules of prudence being transgressed in moments of weakness, while the moral principle remains untainted. We know that Burns's "Bonnie Jean" proved a most exemplary wife; and one of the most truly virtuous and unaffectedly modest women I ever knew was one who had acted thus imprudently. The bride of the future poet was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a husbandman, or substantial yeoman, of Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford, an intimate friend, it would appear, of John Shakespeare's; and hence we may presume that an intimacy prevailed also between the two families, and the not unlikely result was what has been stated.

We now have Shakespeare, at the commencement of his twentieth year, a married man, and the father of a child. On the 2nd of February, 1584-85, before he had completed his twenty-first year, were baptized Hamnet and Judith, twins. We hear of no more children of William and Anne Shakespeare; and soon after—most probably in 1586—Shakespeare left Stratford, and set out to seek his fortune in the metropolis. According to Rowe, he fled to escape from the persecution of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote-park, near Stratford, from whose park he and some other young men had stolen deer—a not unusual, and not very discreditable practice in those days. The knight, we are told, was indignant and vindictive, and the transgressor took his revenge by writing and affixing to the gate of Charlecote-park a satirical ballad, of which the first stanza has been preserved, and which, if genuine, is mere doggrel and utterly unworthy of Shakespeare. He may, however, have so written it on purpose. This is said to have added oil to the fire of the knight's rage, and to escape from it the author fled to London. His biographers in general are of opinion that his resentment against his persecutor did not die out, and that after his death and the lapse of many years he ridiculed him in the character of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this was little in the character of "gentle" Shakespeare; and the whole theory is refuted by the fact that the allusion to "the dozen white luces" in the Justice's coat-armour, on which it is founded, does not occur in the original form of that play. It may have been made afterwards by way of joke, and without any malignity.

There is certainly no inherent improbability in this narrative; and it may have had its effect in determining Shakespeare to quit Stratford. But that it should have been the sole cause of his doing so is what I am disposed to question. We must recollect that Shakespeare was a man endowed with genius of the very highest order, and that he must have aspired to a wider field for its exercise than his native town could afford, that he had a family, and that his circumstances were very slender, while those of his father, as we have sufficient evidence, had been greatly reduced. Nor does it appear that he—who, as has been already observed, except in the case of his marriage, was always prudent—set out for London without having a definite object in view.

Now various companies of players, as we learn, were in the habit of visiting Stratford, like other country towns, and performing there in the Guildhall. It can be hardly doubted that Shakespeare, in whom dramatic genius was inborn, must have been excited by these performances, however low the merit of the pieces—perhaps even have felt that he was capable of producing something superior to them of the same kind. He probably then made the acquaintance of the players, one of whom, Burbage, was, it is supposed, a native of the town, and some others, natives of the county, and proposed embracing their profession. He was young, handsome, of animated and even brilliant conversation. There can be little doubt, then, that he met with encouragement, and was readily received among them. This was, it is most likely, in the year 1586, when he was two-and-twenty. Rowe says "he was received into the company at first in a very mean rank;" and in 1693 the parish-clerk of Stratford, a man eighty years of age, told a person named Dowdall, that he "was received into the playhouse as a serviture." Of course, like almost every other actor, he began at the bottom, having as it were to serve his apprenticeship. This, then, seems to be all true enough; not so another tradition, related by Johnson as coming from Pope and Rowe, namely, that his first occupation in London was holding gentlemen's horses at the door of the playhouse, in which business he succeeded so well that he hired boys to act under him. How little like Shakespeare this is need hardly be said.

A question which cannot be answered very satisfactorily is, What did Shakespeare at this time do with his wife and children? The probability would seem to be, that he left them at Stratford, and, as is most likely, at his father's, till he should see what success he was likely to meet with in London.

It would seem that for the first few years he was merely an actor; and if the Ellesmere Papers, published by Mr. Collier, be genuine, he had in 1589 become a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre. Before this date he may have begun to try his hand at making additions and alterations in the plays of others. Of these we seem to have examples in the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.; and there is a manifest allusion to this practice of his in the following passage of Green's Groat's Worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, published after his death in 1592. Green is addressing his fellow dramatists Marlow, Peele, and others; and he says, "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygre's heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Here the allusion to Shakespeare's name is quite plain, and the line in italics is a parody on one in one of the plays which he appears to have thus treated. As this allusion seems to have caused just offence, Chettle, who had given Green's work to the world, took occasion shortly after in a work of his own, his Kind-hart's Dream, to make an apology, in which he says of Shakespeare, "Myself have seen his demeanour, no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art." We thus see that Shakespeare was regarded as an excellent player (for quality then answered to profession at the present time), as an elegant writer (facetious being employed in its classic sense), and as an upright and honourable man, and further, perhaps, as moving in what we should term good society.

Moreover this work of Chettle's, published at the end of 1592 or beginning of 1593, furnishes what I regard as a proof that Shakespeare had not at that time brought an original piece on the stage; for speaking of Green he says, "He was of singular pleasance, the very supporter, and—to no man's disgrace be this intended—the only comedian of a vulgar writer in this country;" of which last words the plain meaning is, that Green had as yet been the only tolerable writer of English comedy. Now we have sufficient means for judging of Green's comic powers; and surely no man in his senses would have ventured to write these words, had he been ever so prejudiced, if Shakespeare had already produced the Comedy of Errors or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We may therefore venture to assert that neither of these plays was acted earlier than 1593.

We may here, by the way, notice some curious coincidences between Shakespeare and the great comic poet of France, MoliÈre. There is some reason to suppose that both of them were originally connected with the law; they both went on the stage at, we may say, the age of twenty, or a little later. Shakespeare was in his thirtieth year when he produced his first original play, MoliÈre in his thirty-second when he wrote L'Etourdi; but he had previously given some short pieces. Finally, the former died at the close, the latter at the commencement of his fifty-second year.

The allusion to the poet's literary character in Kindhart's Dream was in all probability to his Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593, but which may, as was the custom in those days, have previously circulated in manuscript among his "private friends;" or it may have been to his Sonnets, which, as we shall presently see, thus circulated at this time. It is impossible to say when this poem was written; but there certainly is no necessity for supposing, with Mr. Collier, that it was composed at Stratford. Shakespeare's mind easily retained the requisite rural imagery; and with his power of rapid composition and command of language, a very few weeks would suffice at any time for its production. This poem, which he terms his "unpolished lines," and "the first heir of my invention," was dedicated to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton. It met with general applause, and was followed, in 1594, by Lucrece, also dedicated to the same accomplished nobleman. The dedication, commencing with "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end," would seem to intimate some degree of friendship on both sides; and as Shakespeare's private character, as we have seen, appears to have been most respectable, and Southampton was a well-known admirer of the drama, some kind of intimacy between him and the poet is not by any means improbable. There is also nothing incredible in what Rowe says had been "handed down by Sir William Davenant," of Lord Southampton's having "at one time given him £1000 to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." But the amount must be much exaggerated; for none of Shakespeare's purchases that we hear of ever came to so large a sum. Mr. Collier thinks, with some probability, that, as it appears that the Globe Theatre on the Bankside was built in 1594 by the company to which Shakespeare belonged, Lord Southampton may have given him as much money as his share of the cost came to, which could not well have been more than a few hundred pounds.

It was probably also about this time that he wrote his very enigmatic Sonnets, which Meres, in 1598, calls "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," meaning perhaps which only circulated privately in manuscript. I assign them this early date because their style and language so strongly resemble those of his two poems and his early plays, such as Love's Labour's Lost. They were not published till 1609, and then not by the author himself. They seem to have been collected from those who had the manuscripts by a Mr. W. H., whom therefore the publisher in his dedication terms "the only begetter" of them, "begetter" in the language of the time being getter, collector, &c. It has been conjectured, with great probability, that many of them were written in the person of Lord Southampton for the lady with whom he was enamoured; and others may have been written for other persons, a usual custom then of the poets of France and England. I feel almost convinced that few or none of them were written in the poet's own person. Thus in 1598 he was only thirty-four years old, and yet some of them are in the character of a man grey and advanced in years; even in 1609 he was only forty-five.

Along with the Sonnets was published a poem named A Lover's Complaint, of the genuineness of which I am rather dubious. There had already appeared, in 1599, under the name of Shakespeare, a catchpenny collection called The Passionate Pilgrim, in which are two of his manuscript sonnets, and three of those published the preceding year in Love's Labour's Lost, all of them with an altered text.

An account of the dates, &c., of Shakespeare's plays will follow this Life. Here, therefore, it need only be remarked that they extended over a space of less than twenty years (from 1592 to 1610?), during which time he had an active share in the management of the two theatres, and was also an actor for the whole or the greater part of it. He was, as we may well suppose, with Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and others, a member of the club instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh, and which met at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street, in which street, it may be observed by the way, Milton was born during this period. Fuller has left us some account of the wit-combats that used to take place at the Mermaid between our poet and Ben Jonson.

The relations between Shakespeare and his family during this time are in a state of ambiguity, which no conjecture can fully clear up. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever was on ill terms with his wife; and surely we have no right to suppose that, like La Fontaine, he left her in the country while he himself lived in the metropolis; for Shakespeare was a householder, while La Fontaine lived usually in the hÔtels of his patrons. The more natural supposition is that he would have removed his wife and children to London as soon as he had got a firm footing there. Certainly no entry of the birth of any child of his is to be found in the register of any London parish; but may not some physical change, with which we are unacquainted, have caused his wife to cease from childbearing after the birth of the twins? There is also no entry of this kind in the register of Stratford; and yet it can hardly be that he, any more than La Fontaine, abstained from the bed of his wife in the annual visits which, according to Aubrey's very probable account, he was in the habit of making to his native town. But the burial of his son Hamnet took place in Stratford on the 11th of August, 1596, whence it might appear that the family was living there at that time. To this, however, it may be replied that the family, though usually resident in London, may have been down at Stratford when Hamnet took ill, or that he may have taken ill in London and have been ordered by the physicians to try the effect of his native air, or that, finally, he may have died in London, and his body have been taken down to Stratford for interment with his family, an act quite in character with Shakespeare. The mist, therefore, remains so far undispelled. But we are also to remember that Shakespeare, as above stated, was a householder in London, which might seem to intimate that he had a family there. It is to me a matter of extreme difficulty to believe that he who created so many of the loveliest female characters that the world has ever witnessed, should have led, as, we may say, he otherwise must have done, an irregular life with regard to the sex; for the effect of such conduct is almost always a degrading view of female nature; and how pure on this subject his ideas must always have been is strongly indicated by the circumstance that three of his most lovely female characters—Perdita, Miranda, Imogen—occur in the very last plays he wrote. We may here note the difference between him and La Fontaine. On the whole, then, my opinion is that Shakespeare had his wife and children with him in London, and that his life there was as regular and domestic as his profession permitted.

It has been argued, from a passage in Twelfth Night, in which a man is advised always to marry a woman younger than himself, that Shakespeare had felt the evil consequences of the opposite course. But surely we should not press thus closely language resulting from the situation of a character in a drama. And if Shakespeare was so convinced of the ill consequences of such a procedure, how came it that only a few months before his death he gave an apparently cheerful consent to the marriage of his daughter Judith with Thomas Quiney, who was four years her junior? This objection, then, also may be dismissed, and we remain as uncertain as ever.

We may also venture to deal in a similar way with a passage in the Tempest (iv. 1.), condemnatory of the conduct which he and his wife had pursued before their marriage. Further, as the only mention of his wife in his will is an interlineation, bequeathing her his "second best bed, with the furniture," a want of due regard for her comfort and independence has been inferred. But this in reality is rather indicative of affection; for, as Mr. Knight was the first to observe, as his property was mostly freehold, the law provided for her by assigning her what it terms dower. Lastly, the desire which Mrs. Shakespeare is said to have expressed to be buried with her husband is surely some proof of mutual affection.

It would also seem to be a matter of which there can be little doubt, that Shakespeare must have been an indefatigable reader during the first years of his residence in London. It is strange how none of the commentators appear to have been aware of this fact; for it is the only way of accounting for the remarkable copiousness of his vocabulary. Max MÜller, following Professor Marsh, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, having observed, on the authority of a country clergyman, that some of our peasantry have not more than 300 words in their vocabulary, proceeds as follows:—

"A well-educated person in England, who has been at a public school and at the university, who reads his Bible, his Shakespeare, the Times, and all the books of Mudie's Library, seldom uses more than about 3000 or 4000 words in actual conversation. Accurate thinkers and close reasoners, who avoid vague and general expressions, and wait till they find the word that exactly fits their meaning, employ a larger stock; and eloquent speakers may rise to a command of 10,000. Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words; Milton's works are built up with about 8000; and the Old Testament says all that it has to say with 5642 words."

Now how else but by reading could Shakespeare have got such a store of words? It could not be by conversation, and he surely did not invent more than a few of them. This also tends to prove that Venus and Adonis was not written at Stratford; for his rural vocabulary could hardly have sufficed for such a poem.

But further, I think I am justified in asserting that during the earlier years of his dramatic career Shakespeare acquired a competent knowledge of the French and Italian languages. As we shall see, some of his plays were founded on Italian tales and plays of which no translation has ever been discovered; and the natural inference then is, that he had read them in the original. As to the French, he must have been able to write as well as read it. As a proof, in his Henry V. there are scenes of mingled French and English, which scenes are, like all the prose scenes in our old dramatists, in what I have denominated metric prose; and this could only be caused by the whole scene having been the production of the one mind. The French, too, is incorrect, as it is also in the really prose French scene between Katherine and Alice. It seems therefore probable in the highest degree that Shakespeare was able to write French. In like manner Ben Jonson has shown in his Alchemist and elsewhere, that he was able to write Spanish and other languages.

Another curious question is, Was Shakespeare ever out of England? This, too, cannot be determined; but it is clear to me, from various passages of his plays, that he must have been familiar with the sea-shore; and, from his correct use of nautical terms, we might suspect that he had been at sea on board a ship once, if not oftener. I cannot see any equal proof of his having been familiar with mountain scenery; and from the comparative vagueness of his language respecting mountains in Cymbeline and elsewhere, I rather suspect that he had never gazed on a mountain-range.

In 1597, the year after he had lost his only son, Shakespeare began to carry into effect his long-cherished project of acquiring property in his native county. For the seemingly trifling sum of £60 he purchased from William Underhill one of the best houses in the town of Stratford, named New Place, built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the reign of Henry VII., consisting of one messuage, two barns, and two gardens, with their appurtenances. It was situated in Chapel-street Ward; and as, in a note taken of corn and malt during a dearth in the beginning of the following year, we find him set down as the holder of ten quarters, it would appear that his family, if not he himself, must have been residing at that time in this place.

For some years subsequent to this date we find a few notices of purchases &c. in which Shakespeare was engaged, but nothing that throws any light on his personal history. Neither can we ascertain at what time it was that he disposed of his theatric property; for that he did so is plain, as he says nothing of it in his will. It would seem, however, to have been subsequent to 1610. It would also appear that he lived in Stratford in very handsome style, probably exercising a generous hospitality; for we learn from the diary of the Rev. J. Ward, vicar of that town in 1662, that he had heard that Shakespeare "spent at the rate of £1000 a-year." This sum, however, though not by any means so large, relative to the present value of money, as is usually supposed, is utterly incredible; but still it proves the tradition of his housekeeping having been liberal.

On the 5th of June, 1607, Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna, was married to Dr. John Hall, a physician of some eminence, settled in Stratford. They had but one child, a daughter named Elizabeth, who was married first to Thomas Nash, and secondly to John (afterwards Sir John) Barnard, of Abington, in Northamptonshire. She died in 1649, having had no children by either husband; and with her ended the lineal descent from the great Shakespeare; for Judith, his other daughter, who married a couple of months before his death, though she had three sons, outlived them all, as none of them attained to the age of twenty years. Poetic genius seems fated never to found a family; it is above the vulgar distinctions of human life.

We know not the exact date of Shakespeare's final departure from London and settlement at Stratford; but it probably was not much later than the year 1610. His life after his retirement was not destined to be very long. We may picture him to ourselves as passing his days in tranquil enjoyment, interesting himself somewhat in the affairs of the borough, conversing with his neighbours, telling anecdotes of his life in London, reading his Bible and Chaucer, Spenser, and other poets, and no doubt his North's Plutarch, giving occasional play to his wit, in short, leading the life of a wise and sensible man, contented with the condition he had made his mature choice of as most productive of happiness.

It is probable that in his fifty-second year he felt a decline in his constitution which reminded him of the uncertainty of life; for on the 25th of January, 1615-16, he made his Will, which was executed exactly two months later; and on the 23rd of the following April he breathed his last. He was buried in the church of Stratford, where his grave and monument may still be seen. The disease of which he died is unknown. The vicar, Mr. Ward, already referred to, says, "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." This no doubt is not impossible, but it is not very probable. If we may judge from passages in his plays, Shakespeare was an enemy to deep drinking; and it is hardly likely that he should, so late in life too, have committed such excess (worthy only of a Burns) as is here supposed, even in the company of Ben Jonson, a visit from whom to Stratford, if he had made it, would with its consequences in all probability have formed part of his communications to Drummond two years later. We may then, I think, safely venture to reject this account of Shakespeare's death, and acknowledge that its cause is utterly unknown, and will probably always remain unknown.

It would appear from Shakespeare's Will that he had at the time of his death but very little money; for, excepting a few trifling legacies, the only sum mentioned is £300 which he left to his younger daughter Judith, making apparently a very unequal division of his property; for to his elder daughter Susanna he left all his lands, tenements, etc., in Stratford and elsewhere, the value of which must have been very far beyond that of the sum devised to Judith. In fact we might suppose that the property enumerated in a general way in his Will had cost more, and were of greater value than would seem to be indicated.

It might be supposed that the cause of this unequal division was displeasure at Judith's marriage; but, beside that we have no proof of any such feeling towards her, the real cause lies evidently far deeper. It was his passionate desire to be the founder of a family in his native county. This it was that animated all his theatric exertions, and he regarded the wonderful creations of his genius merely as means to this one great end. We might have presumed that the death of his only son in 1596 would have given a check to this passion; but, on the contrary, it was, as we have seen, in the very next year that he commenced purchasing property in Warwickshire; and we also find that in that year, or more certainly in 1599, a grant of arms was made to John Shakespeare by the Heralds' College, in which he was authorized to impale the bearings of the Ardens, his wife's family, with his own; and the probability would seem to be, that previously the Shakespeare family had had no coat of arms. By a statute, however, of the later Plantagenets every freeholder was to have his proper seal of arms; and that of the Shakespeares may have been the eagle and spear, whence the Heralds easily formed the coat of arms used by Shakespeare. In obtaining this, John Shakespeare must have acted under the influence and at the expense of his son William.

In his Will, Shakespeare leaves his lands, tenements, &c. to his daughter Susanna, and after her death to her eldest son and his heirs male, and, in default of heirs male of him, to her second son, and so on to the seventh son, and, in default of such issue, to his niece (i.e. granddaughter) Elizabeth Hall and her heirs male, and, in default of them, to his daughter Judith and her heirs male, and, in their default, to the right heirs of the testator.

Every precaution we see was here taken, but all in vain; for, as we have hinted, it seems to be the order of Providence that literary genius should not be the foundation of worldly rank and greatness. Most persons will here call to mind the parallel case of Sir Walter Scott, who, too, as fondly and as vainly yearned to be the founder of a part of the rural aristocracy of his native land, and in whose eyes it was greater to be Laird of Abbotsford than the author of Waverley. But the advantage was on the side of the bard of Avon; for he sought no literary fame, content with a life of peace and competence, while the Scottish baronet would fain have had literary fame as well as wealth and title. How different were the latter days of the two men!

From what precedes—few, very few, as the circumstances are—some faint idea may be formed of Shakespeare as a man. As a poet, his works present him to us, in all his fulness, as the most wonderful dramatic genius that ever the world has seen, ranging with equal ease from the lowest to the highest point of the whole scale of the drama, from the broad farce of the Comedy of Errors, through the enchanting light and graceful comedy of As You Like It, and similar pieces, up to the sublimest tragedy of Macbeth, Lear, Othello. Of him alone can this be asserted. We have no reason to suppose that the great tragic poets of Greece, any more than those of France, excelled also in comedy; while the dramatists of Spain notoriously failed in tragedy, and their comedy, gay, spritely and animated as it is, depends chiefly on plot and intrigue, and is greatly deficient in variety of character.

Mr. Dyce has justly observed how absurd it is to say that Shakespeare was, though the greatest, only one of a race of contemporary giants. The poetic greatness of Jonson, Fletcher, and Massinger was doubtless beyond that witnessed in most other ages of the world; but surely they were but as the stars to the sun when compared with Shakespeare. In like manner I apprehend few will agree with the following character of Shakespeare as a poet, drawn by Gifford in his Introduction to the Plays of Massinger.

"The claims of this great poet on the admiration of mankind are innumerable, but rhythmical modulation is not one of them; nor do I think it either wise or just to hold him forth as supereminent in every quality which constitutes genius. Beaumont is as sublime, Fletcher as pathetic, and Jonson as nervous. Nor let it be accounted poor or niggard praise to allow him only an equality with these extraordinary men in their peculiar excellencies, while he is admitted to possess many others, to which they made no approaches. Indeed if I were asked for the discriminating quality of Shakespeare's mind, that by which he is raised above all competition, above all prospect of rivalry, I should say it was WIT."

That Shakespeare possessed that aroma of humour which we denominate wit, beyond any of his contemporaries or successors, is a matter about which, I think, there cannot be two opinions. I will not deny that in nervousness Jonson may have equalled him, but I certainly know not where to look for the sublime in Beaumont which rivalled that of Macbeth and Lear; and unquestionably I should never even dream of putting the morbid softness of Fletcher in comparison with the genuine manly pathos of Shakespeare. There was however one thing in which I must confess they all exceeded him—perspicuity; for though in many, very many parts of his plays the language is most lucid and unconstrained, there are others—in Troilus and Cressida for instance—which task the intellect to understand them, and which never could have been intelligible to an ordinary audience. But the fact is, neither he nor any other of his brother dramatists ever seems to have asked himself the simple question, Will the audience understand this? I finally must assert, in opposition to Gifford, that, where Shakespeare's verse is uninjured, we have abundant proof that no poet ever excelled him in "rhythmical modulation," and that, when we would produce the most melodious verse in our language, it is in his plays that we shall find our best specimens. It seems to me quite idle to say with Coleridge that Shakespeare's verse is peculiar in rhythm and structure; for, from the nature of verse, it could not be so. It is just as idle to say with Johnson that the blank verse of Thomson is not that of Milton. The difference in such cases lies wholly in the language; and that of Shakespeare is peculiar. This is caused by an excess of figurative expression, in which his metaphors are often broken and confused and his similes imperfect, by inversions and transpositions, and by the use of words in unusual and even incorrect senses.

Shakespeare's power of observation must have been not merely extensive but marvellous:—

Nothing, in fact, high or low, seems to have escaped him; he discerned the nicest shades and varieties of looks, of manners, of language. He had also, in a remarkable degree, that power—that clairvoyance, as we may perhaps venture to term it—so requisite to the dramatist and the novelist, of developing from the faintest sketch, the merest outline, the entire of a character, with its appropriate sentiments, action, and language. In the number and variety of characters no writer ever equalled him, and all are fully and completely delineated, none are, as in other dramatists, mere sketches. Some, such as his Clowns, are peculiar to himself; we meet with no Clowns in the dramas of his contemporaries and successors,—the Gracioso of the Spanish drama, an independent creation, being the nearest approach to them. But of all his creations what has always most astonished me are his women. They are exclusively his own; Fletcher, Massinger, or any other, has nothing like them. Perhaps the nearest approach is made in Spain also, by Cervantes; in whom, however, as in the Spanish drama, they want variety. They would seem to have been produced, if I may so express it, by a projection of his own gentle and noble nature into female forms; for he surely never met his Rosalinds, Mirandas, and Perditas in real life, though he may have had some faint sketches of some of them in his own daughters. He seems to have shrunk almost instinctively from portraying bad women. Goneril and Regan alone are unredeemed; for Lady Macbeth is awful, not detestable, and even the Queen of Cymbeline is but an Agrippina, for like her she is criminal but not selfish.

In fine, though I will not, with Mr. Buckle, term Shakespeare "the greatest of the sons of men"—for I cannot give that preeminence to imagination, observation, and language over the other mental powers, so as to place him above Aristotle and Newton—I will say here of him, as I have said in my 'Life of Milton' that "he was the mightiest poetic mind that Nature has ever produced," and that, in his case, statues and other memorials are utterly needless and superfluous. If we are asked for his monument, we should simply point to his Plays and say,—Monumentum si quÆris, inspice! and, in my opinion, he consults best for the poet's fame who seeks to restore his works to their pristine form.

The reader will see by this sketch how little is really known concerning Shakespeare. I have endeavoured, as will be seen, to rectify some points in his biography.