the court of Common Pleas, and the friend of John Selden, is also born this year, in Cardiganshire. 1609. 46 SHAKSPERE'S FORTY-SIXTH YEAR. 66 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE is yet a resident in London, A.D. where he "occupies a good house within the liberty of the Clink." His Sonnets" are now first published; as is also his tragedy of Troilus and Cressida,' the only play of Shakspere,' says A. W. Schlegel, "which he allowed to be printed without being previously represented." "The late and much admired play, called 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre;' with the true relation of the whole history, adventures, and fortunes, of the said Prince; as also the no less strange and worthy accidents in the birth and life of his daughter Marianna," is likewise printed for the first time, "as it hath been divers and sundry times acted by his majesty's servants at the Globe on the Bankside; and the author, we are told on the title, is William Shakspere. There are also reprints of "Romeo and Juliet," and of the enlarged copy of "Hamlet." Cyril Tourner's "Revenger's Tragedy" and Thomas Dekker's "Gull's Hornbook," are now printed; and Nathaniel Field is just commencing to write for the stage. The silenced ministers publish an humble supplication for toleration; and that too, good God! in a country calling itself Christian. Joseph Hall (one day to be bishop of Norwich) now preaches his sermon, "It is Finished," at St. Paul's Cross, in London. Robert Carr, a worthy Scot, becomes a favourite with "the British Solomon." "The Book of Common Prayer" is printed in Irish, for William Daniel, (or O'Donnell) the new archbishop of Tuam. Lancelot Andrews, one of the translators of the Bible, a scholar acquainted with fifteen languages; is translated from the see of Chichester to that of Ely; another of them, Dr. Samuel Ward, is chosen master of Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge; and a third, George Abbott, (of "tyranny is God's authority" notoriety,) is made bishop of Lichfield and Coventry; whilst a fourth, Dr. Thomas Ravis, bishop of Gloucester, rests for ever from his labours on the fourteenth day of December. The New River from Amwell, in Hertfordshire, to London, is now commenced; and a proclamation is issued against building houses on new foundations within two miles of the metropolis, and the fronts are henceforth to be of stone or brick. Silk worms and mulberry trees are introduced into England; so that one may imagine the interest which the great bard would take in watching the growth of the one planted by his own hands at Stratfordupon-Avon, and the hearty curse he would have uttered on the "churlish priest," if he could have anticipated the tasteless wretch destroying it out of spite,-merely to annoy the inhabitants and visitors of the birth-place and death-place of the greatest of our English poets. Copper coin is now legally coined in England, to supplant the leaden tokens used up to this period; and the manufacture of alum―a branch of commerce which has hitherto helped to enrich the papal see-is brought to perfection in England—alum works being established at Gisborough, in Cleveland, by Sir Thomas Chaloner the younger. William Warner, author of "Albion's England;" the Rev. Alexander Hume, the Scottish sacred poet; James Arminius, founder of the sect of Arminians; Caravaggio and Zucchero, the Roman painters; and Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese painter, are amongst the illustrious men who this year finish their mortal career,-poor Carracci dying of grief at the infamous ingratitude of Cardinal Farnese, who paid him with five hundred gold scudi, for the labour of twenty years! The reader will find several of the paintings of this unfortunate artist-principally religious pieces and landscapes-in our own National Gallery. Why cannot we have museums, and picture galleries, and good libraries, free to all classes of the people, in every locality? Sir Matthew Hale, the eminent English judge, is this year born at Alderley, in Gloucestershire; and Pietro Francesco Mola, the Roman painter, at Lugano, in Switzerland. SHAKSPERE'S FORTY-SEVENTH YEAR. MALONE supposes Shakspere's "Timon of Athens" A.D. to belong to this year. Samuel Daniel publishes 1610. his drama called "Tethy's Festival." Camden's "Britannia"-which, being published by its learned author in Latin "is caviare to the general," though it this year reaches a tenth edition-is now translated into English for the general reader, by Philemon Holland. The Rev. Giles Fletcher publishes his poem of "Christ's Victory;" Sir Francis Bacon, his treatise "Of the Wisdom of the Ancients;" and John Heath, B.A., a fellow of New College, Oxford, his "Epigrams," in which is the following one on Tobacco : "We buy the driest wood that we can find, Buying the herb only for the smoke's sake." Silvester Jourdan now pubilshes an account of the discovery of the Bermudas, giving a narrative of the ship: wreck of Sir George Somers, on his voyage to Virginia, which R. H. Horne supposes to have furnished Shakspere with his plot of that delightful comedy, "The Tempest.' Thomas Hobbes, now a young man of two-and-twenty years of age, the last five of which have been spent in study at Oxford, is appointed tutor to Lord Cavendish, (afterwards Earl of Devonshire,) in which capacity he accompanies him through France, Italy, and Germany.Isaac Casaubon, "that man of rare learning and ingenuity," as Izaak Walton has it, having lost his protector in France, by the assassination of Henry IV., (murdered, on the fourteenth of May, by the fanatical friar, Francis Ravaillac,) accompanies Sir Henry Wotton to England, in the month of October, and is presented with a pension of three hundred pounds by the king, and two prebends, one at Canterbury, and another at Westminster. George Abbot -one of those political reptiles who crawl into the church, and entwine themselves around the pillars of the state, defiling everything with their slime, and poisoning every good thing within the reach of their venomous influenceis now made bishop of London, and will soon gain the archbishopric of Canterbury. Henry Hudson, one of that hardy band of navigators, who are, like her poets, the glory of England, sails from London on the seventeenth of April, in a vessel called the Discovery, discovers the bay known by his name, and is there turned adrift in an open boat, with his son and seven infirm seamen, by a cruel and mutinous crew, and are never heard of more. The foundation-stone of a proper building for the Bodleian library is laid at Oxford, on the nineteenth of July. A Roman catholic translation of the Bible into English is this year printed at Douay, in the north of France. The English house of commons now begins to feel more independent than in the days of Elizabeth, and complains of the profusion of the "British Solomon," who lavishes large sums on his Scottish favourites. Thermometers are said to be invented about this period, by a Dutchman. 209 1611. SHAKSPERE'S FORTY-EIGHTH YEAR. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE'S beautiful comedy of "The A.D. Tempest," which many critics suppose to be the last written of all the dramas of our immortal bard, is now printed. "How beautiful the thought," says R. H. Horne, "that after his hard struggle with the common world, and the licentious society into which he had been so much thrown, he should yet have preserved the freshness of the heart, the youth of mind, the purity of affection, and the magnanimity of soul, which pervade this 'enchanted' drama." A third reprint of the enlarged copy of Shakspere's tragedy of "Hamlet" is now sent forth from the London press, from which demand for the drama one may see that it is not looked upon by English readers as "The work of a drunken savage." There is also a second quarto edition of his "Pericles." This, it is supposed, is the last year spent by the great dramatist in the metropolis. He longs for the rural scenes of his boyhood; to end his days where they began to lay his ashes beside those of his beloved parents, when his gentle spirit shall have gone to join the shades of the wise and good of every clime in "the mansions of the blest." Ben Jonson's tragedy of "Cataline," Ludwick Barry's comedy of "Ram Alley," and Thomas Heywood's historical play of "The Golden Age," are amongst the plays printed this year; and Middleton and Dekker, ministering to the morbid appetite of the vulgar of all classes, have founded a comedy on the lawless deeds of an unwomanly woman called Mary Frith, (a female highway robber, known by the cognomen of Moll Cutpurse, English Moll, etc.) which is now printed with the title of "The Roaring Girl," and "adorned" with a full-length portrait of the heroine, dressed in man's apparel, with a drawn sword in her right hand, and a tobacco-pipe in her left! She is the Mistress Moll whose picture is alluded to by Sir Toby Belch, in the third scene of the first act of Shakspere's Twelfth Night," and is frequenlly alluded to by the English poets and dramatists. M 2 210 A.D. SHAKSPEARE'S FORTY-NINTH YEAR. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE, who seems to have constantly visited his native Stratford-upon-Avon, during the 1612. intervals of his London labours as a player and dramatist, is now once more a resident of that ancient town. In the month of March, the dramatist purchases a house in Blackfriars, from one Henry Walker, and is described in the title-deeds as "of Stratford-upon-Avon, gentleman.” A knavish bookseller publishes a third edition of Shakspere's "Passionate Pilgrim," a pirated publication, in which he has the unblushing impudence to give Heywood's translation of two of Ovid's "Epistles" as Shakspere's. A "Gilbert Shakspere, adolescens," is this year buried at Stratford-upon-Avon, but in what degree he was related to the poet is unknown. Nathaniel Field (a celebrated actor of female parts, for as yet women have not appeared on the stage as players) now produces his comedy of "Woman's a Weathercock," and the Rev. Robert Daborne, a play called "The Christian turned Turk." Thomas Heywood, the laborious author and actor, publishes his "Apology for Actors," in which he says, truly enough, that " plays have taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read, in the discovery of our English chronicles; and," he asks, "what man have you now of that weak capacity, that being possest of their true use, cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror until this day?" And yet the day is fast approaching, in which the English drama, despite the labours in her behalf of Shakspere and his brother Titans in the literary world-for there are giants in the earth in those days"-must be trampled, for a time, under the rude heels of sour-souled Puritanism, and then be liberated only to be debauched by the French-polished Heartlessness introduced with the unfortunate "restoration" of the second Charles. Michael Drayton sends forth to the world the first part of his "Polyolbion," an antiquarian poem, as it may be called, which will ever immortalise its author. John Hales is appointed professor of Greek at Oxford. William Baffin, the English navigator, visits West Greenland; George Calixtus, a celebrated theologian of the Lutheran church, visits the English universities; and Dr. Miles Smith, one of the translators of the authorised version of the Bible, and author of the 66 |