It was in 1802, when our country was threatened with invasion, and the arms of France seemed almost resistless, that a great living poet, Wordsworth, wrote these lines : "In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible knights of old: We must be free, or die, who speak the tongue And this was no idle boast. The connexion between England's freedom and the name of England's greatest writer was not an imaginary one. The "armoury" that was hung in "our halls" was not the breastplate and the helmet that our fathers wore at Agincourt. The "armoury to which the poet alludes was the inheritance of thoughts and feelings which we had derived from the great minds who had gone before us. From him whose name "is the greatest in our literature-it is the greatest in all literature,"+-we have received such a stock of household thoughts, gradually but surely entering into the national soul during successive generations, that we "who speak the tongue" which he spake "must be free, or die." Nor was it that we were to find in the mass of writings which Shakspere has bequeathed to us any specific exhortations to freedom, any rapturous declamations on our national greatness, any incense to that pride which all nations feel, and would be unworthy of the name of nation if they did not feel. There is much in Shakspere to excite, in We have placed at the head of this paper the autograph of "WILLM. SHAKSPERE." Copied from his undoubted signature in the volume of Montaigue's Essays, by John Florio, which was purchased for a large sum by the Trustees of the British Museum. This autograph has set at rest the long-disputed question of the mode in which the poet wrote his name. Sir Frederic Madden has satisfactorily shown, in a letter published in the Archæologia,' vol. xxvii., that in the five other acknowledged genuine signatures in existence, namely, in the three attached to his will, and the two affixed to deeds connected with the mortgage and sale of a property in Blackfriars, "the poet always wrote his name SHAKSPERE, and, consequently, that those who have inserted an e after the k, or an a in the second syllable, do not write the same (as far as we are able to judge) in the same manner as the poet himself uniformly would authorize us to do." In the Stratford Register, both at his baptism and burial, says Sir F. Madden, the name is spelt Shakspere. We may add that, in the same registers, the entries of the baptism of his three children, and of the burial of his son (which entries were most probably made under his own inspection), are spelt Shakspere. The printers, however, during his life, and in the folio of 1623, spell his name Shakespeare. A furious controversy has been going on for two years upon this subject, which much resembles that of the big-endians and little-endians in Gullivers Travels." We choose to belong to the party who spell the name as the poet wrote it; but we shall not quarrel with those who spell it as his contemporaries printed it. † Hallam. cidentally, a just patriotism; but there is very little of what may be called patriotic poetry. There is, however, something better. Freedom, in the highest sense of the word, is the result of a nation's intelligence,-not the intelligence which consists in mere skill in the imitative arts, in accurate knowledge of the abstract sciences, in the applications of mechanical and chemical discovery,-but which is created out of the habit of looking at the entire physical and moral world with more especial reference to man's ultimate capabilities and destinies than to the mere sensual utilities of the things around us. It is the great and enduring effect of a high literature such as England possesses, and of which Shakspere is the unquestioned head, to keep alive this nobler intelligence; to diffuse it through every corner of the land; to make its light penetrate into the humblest cottage; to mould even the lisping accents of the child to the utterance of its words. A literature such as this follows in the wake of the higher spiritual instruction,― an auxiliary to what we may more emphatically call Wisdom. To estimate the influence of such a writer as Shakspere upon the Intelligence of England would be a vain attempt, because the most powerful effects of that influence are indirect. It is sufficient to say, there has lived amongst us a man who possessed a power, surpassing that of all other men, of delineating almost every possible combination of human character. He has not represented mere abstract qualities, such as a good man and a bad man, a mild and passionate, a humble and a proud; but he has painted men as they are, with mixed qualities and mixed motives, the result of temperament and education; and so painting them he has not only succeeded in kindling and cherishing within us the highest admiration and love of what is noble, and generous, and just, and true, but in making us kind and tolerant towards the errors of our fellow-creatures, compassionate even for their vices. But the same man has never broken down the distinction, as other writers have done, between what is worthy to be loved and imitated, and what to be pitied and shunned. We have no moral monsters in Shakspere, no generous housebreakers, no philanthropic murderers. We see men as they are; but we see them also with a clearness that it would be vain to expect from our own unassisted vision. The same great master of all the secrets of the human heart is also the expounder of the very highest and noblest philosophy. Books of no inconsiderable size have been made out of his mere moral axioms. To those who are familiar with Shakspere's writings there is scarcely a situation of human affairs which will not suggest a recollection of some. thing that may be applied to it for instruction out of what he has written. Many of our habitual sayings, that enter into the minds even of the uninstructed as something to which they have become familiar without books, are Shakspere's. If two men of average education converse together for half an hour on general subjects, there can be little doubt that, without actual quotation, the ever genial wit of Shakspere will be found to have given point, and his universal poetry elevation, to their discourse. The mode in which the mind of Shakspere is penetrating through all other lands exhibits the stages in the progress of his universality in our own land. He first becomes the property of the highest and the most educated minds. They have acknowledged his influence at first timidly and suspiciously; but the result is invariable: the greatest intellects become prostrate before this master intellect. Under false systems of criticism, both in our own and in other countries, the merits of Shakspere as a whole have been misunderstood; and he has been held as a violator of certain conventional principles of art, upon which poetry was to be built as churches were built in the same age,-with nothing irregular, nothing projecting, a good solid cube, with one window exactly like another, and a doorway in the middle. The architects of our fine old Gothic cathedrals, and Shakspere, were equally held to be out of the pale of regular art. They were wild and irregular geniuses, more to be wondered at than imitated. But, with all this, there never was a period, however low its standard of taste, when many a votary did not feel a breathless awe as he entered such cathedrals as York and Lincoln, and had his devotion raised and refined by the matchless beauty and sublimity of the temple in which he prayed. And, in the same way, there never was a period since Shakspere's plays were first acted in a mean theatre, without scenery or decoration,-up to the present time when they are the common possession of Europe, and are known amongst millions of men who inhabit mighty continents and islands where the English tongue was almost or wholly unspoken when he lived,-there never was a period when the love and reverence which England now bears him were not most ardently cherished in the hearts of the best and the most influential of the people-those who thought for themselves. Even those who scoffed at his art never doubted his power. They would criticise him, they would attempt to mend him, -but he was always "the incomparable." They held, too, that he was unlearned; but they also held that he knew everything without learning. Nature did for him, they said, what study did for other men. Thus they endeavoured to raise him in the mass, and degrade him in the detail; and by dint of their absurd general admiration, and their equally absurd depreciation of minute parts of his writings, they laboured to propagate an opinion which would have been fatal to one less really great, that he was a person, not exactly inspired, but producing higher efforts of imagination, and displaying the most varied and accurate knowledge, without the education and the labour by which very inferior productions of literature were ordinarily produced. These were the critics of our own country, from the days of the Restoration almost up to the end of the reign of George III. But, in the mean while, after the hateful taste was put down that we imported from France with all the vices of the court of Charles II., Shakspere again became the unquestionably best property of the English stage. There never was a period in which he was not diligently read. Four folio editions of his works were printed in 62 years-1623 to 1685, a time most unfavourable to literature. It is in this way-by the multitude of readers—that Spakspere has become universal. If books were now to perish, if "letters should not be known," the influence of Shakspere could not be eradicated from amongst those who speak his tongue the moral and intellectual influence would remain after the works which had produced it had perished. But they could not perish wholly: some fragments of the knowledge of which he is full,-some consecutive words of the exquisite diction in which he abounds,-some dim abbreviation of the wonderful characters with which he has peopled the earth,would start up in remote places, as the flowers of past centuries again make their appearance when the forests of more recent times have been swept away. This is a consummation which cannot happen. Shakspere, through the invention of printing, is, in the limited use of the word, eternal. It has been considered a proper opening of a work which desires to make the great body of the people familiar with sound and abiding knowledge to devote the first number, or rather two numbers, to a view of the life, in connexion with the writings, of him to whom was given this praise,-and to him alone it could be justly given,— "He was not of an age, but for all time." One of the editors of Shakspere,-and he that possessed the greatest shrewdness, mixed with the most unreasonable portion of prejudice and unfairness,--Steevens-says, " All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspere is—that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon-married and had children there went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." This is not true. The life of the most distinguished modern statesman, whose course may be traced by document upon document, might be despatched in a similar antithetical summary. This is not "all that is known with any degree of certainty." There is, indeed, a lamentable deficiency in the materials for Shakspere's life, such as perhaps exists in no similar instance of a man so eminent amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Hallam has justly observed, "All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have detected about Shakspere serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name, that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, can be produced." And yet the register of their births, of their marriages, of the children born to them, of their deaths, and to which in many cases we may add the record of their wills, are the only traces which are left, after the lapse of two centuries and a half, of the greater number of those who have dwelt upon the same earth and in the same country with ourselves. But if there were a proportionate motive in the character of any man to connect such meagre records with the time and circumstances in which he lived, it would not be an unworthy task to attempt to shadow out his life by the help of these imperfect traces of his career. Such is the task which antiquaries are constantly proposing to themselves with regard to men in whom the world takes very little interest. There is, perhaps, no man whose life would not be interesting could we know, and know truly, all the circumstances of it. If we have to follow the course of a very distinguished man, the interest of the subject may compensate for the paucity of the facts. If we have nothing but registers, and title-deeds, and pedigrees, and wills, we must be content with these "spoils of time," in the absence of matters which bring us nearer to the individual. We have, however, as we have said, to group these records, amidst the mass of circumstances of which they form so small a part. A writer of the present day, who has given an impulse to our abstract thinking, which like all other such impulses may eventually be traced onward to practical results—Mr. Carlyle-in a review of a popular edition of a biographical work, says, "Along with that tombstone information, perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked to gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question: What and how was English Life in time? wherein has ours grown to differ therefrom? In other words: What things have we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before we, from such distance, can put ourselves in -'s place; and so, in the full sense of the term, understand him, his sayings and his doings?" If we fill up the blank with the name of Shakspere, we have a very clear exposition of the spirit in which it appears to us that the Life of Shakspere ought to be written. We have the "tombstone information," but we have something more. The life of Shakspere has to us a value above that of all other values in connexion with his writings. Whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the dates of particular works, there is, upon the whole, sufficient evidence to enable us to class those works in cycles. We may trace the poet onward with tolerable certainty through the different epochs of his genius-its morning softness, its noontide fervour, its afternoon splendour, its evening serenity. What we want still is to know something of the private history of this wonderful writer-to have "the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of 'Macbeth and Lear.'"* Something, however, may be done, towards making this desired identity not only clear but natural. As far as Shakspere can be traced in connexion with his writings we are not quite sure that we have more to expect,― we have perhaps little more to desire. He belonged to a profession which has always been destined to have the applause of a portion of the world counterbalanced by the censure of another portion. He was a large proprietor, and without doubt the literary director, of a theatre to which other poets contributed their productions in common with himself. He was not only a great innovator, but a most successful one; and after he had destroyed the rude art of his early contemporaries, he had to oppose his principles to what was considered the more learned art of his later rivals. We should not desire to have the secret passages of such a professional life revealed to us. We fear that, however marvellous might appear the power through which the poet had carried his genius loftily and purely amidst all the littlenesses by which he must have been surrounded, there would have been something in the exhibition that for the moment would have given us pain. Shakspere, in 1602, bought a considerable quantity of land in the neighbourhood of Stratford, and we have no doubt that he himself farmed it. It was the custom for gentlemen to attend to all the details of the productive and commercial part of farming in Shakspere's day. It is nothing derogatory in the eye of philosophy that the author of Lear,' perhaps in the very intervals of its composition, should be bargaining for a load of wheat or a score of wethers. It was just that having sold his wheat he should be paid for it. But we confess to the weakness of being startled when an original document was 1564 put into our hands clearly showing how Shakspere in worldly matters was like other men. It was a precept, attached to a declaration of William Shakspere against Philip Rogers, in an action of debt, for the sum of thirty-five shillings and ten pence, for corn delivered in 1603 and 1604; and the usual remedies were sought in the Court of Record at Stratford. The boy William Henry Ireland, who forged the Shakspere manuscripts in 1795, began with "a lease," to which he affixed a pretended autograph of Shakspere. Success made him bold, and he proceeded to "a profession of faith." He was next tempted into the manufacture of love-letters, and letters of friendship, full of fine thoughts and superlative protestations. All this exhibited very considerable inexperience and want of knowledge in the unfortunate boy who attempted these delusions. If any letters of Shakspere were hereafter to be discovered we have no doubt that they would be business-like letters, as brief as possible, neither letters of display, nor letters speaking out of the abundance of the heart: these are inventions of modern times. In the absence of newspapers, men and women wrote gossiping letters to each other about public events and private scandal. We doubt if Shakspere had time for writing such letters. But whether it be desirable or not to have the hidden places of Shakspere's private history laid open to us, it is not very likely, we think, that they ever will be so displayed. Some additions to our scanty knowledge will no doubt be derived from the same species of diligence as that which has been so worthily employed within the last ten years, by Mr. Collier particularly. But for the most part, we must, we apprehend, be content with "tombstone information," counting ourselves happy to live in a land of which the civilization has been sufficiently advanced, during more than three centuries, to make it a part of the public policy to record the marked events in the progress from the cradle to the grave of the humblest of our country's children, and which records are the most efficient guides in tracing the course of the greatest who has been born and died amongst us- -William Shakspere. In the register of baptisms of the parish church of Stratfordupon-Avon we find, under the date of April 26, 1564, the entry of the baptism of William, the son of John Shakspere. The entry is in Latin. The date of the year, and the word April, occur three lines above the entry-the birth being the fourth registered in that month. 5 April 26 Enkelmus filius Johannes & Bakfeare The date of William Shakspere's birth has always been taken as three days before his baptism; but there is certainly no evidence of this fact. Who was John Shakspere, the father of William? The same register of baptisms shows, it is reasonably conjectured, that he had two daughters baptised in previous years,-Jone, September 15th, 1558; Margaret, December 2nd, 1562. Another brief entry in another book closes the record of Margaret Shakspere; she was buried on the 30th of April, 1563. There is very little doubt that the elder daughter, Jone, died also in infancy; for another daughter of John Shakspere, also called Jone, was baptised in 1569. William was in all probability the first of the family who lived beyond the period of childhood. From these records, then, we collect, that John Shakspere was married and living in the parish of Stratford in 1558. He was no doubt settled there earlier; for in the archives of the town, by which his course may be traced for some years, we find that he was, in 1556, one of the jury of the court-leet; in 1557, one of the ale-tasters; at Michaelmas of that year, or very soon afterwards, he was elected a burgess or junior member of the corporation; in 1558 and 1559 he served the office of constable, which duty appears then to have been imposed upon the younger members of the corporate body; lastly, in 1561, he was elected one of the • Hallam's Literature of Europe.' chamberlains. Here, then, previous to the birth of William Shakspere, we find his father passing through the regular gradations of those municipal offices which were filled by the most respectable inhabitants of a country town-those who, following trades or professions, or possessed of a small independence, were useful in their several degrees, and received due honour and reverence from their neighbours. What the occupation of John Shakspere was cannot be very readily determined. Aubrey, the antiquary, who lived till nearly the end of the seventeenth century, and whose manuscripts, preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, contain some very quaint and amusing notices of eminent persons who flourished just before and in his day, says, "Mr. William Shakespear was born at Stratfordupon-Avon, in the county of Warwick; his father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore, by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech." There has been recently published a letter, which was formerly in the possession of the family of Lord de Clifford, written by a member of one of the inns of court, and giving an account of the writer's visit to Warwickshire in 1693. After copying the inscription on the poet's monument, Published by Mr. Rodd, under the title of Traditionary Anecdotes of Shakspere.' he says, "The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. He says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the playhouse as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family; but the male line is extinguished." Aubrey's anecdotes of Shakspere are supposed to have been collected about 1680. The letterwriter from Warwickshire was gratifying his honourable curiosity about him whom he styles "our English tragedian” in 1693. The parish clerk "above eighty years old" was probably the informant of both parties. He would have been about three years old when Shakspere died; and the period of Shakspere's apprenticeship which he records would have been some forty years earlier. Absolute correctness, therefore, was not likely to have been attained by this honest chronicler. The accounts, it will be seen, materially differ. Aubrey says, "His father was a butcher;" the parish clerk, "He was bound apprentice to a butcher." To the edition of Shakspere's works published by Rowe in 1709, was prefixed a 'Life.' Rowe acknowledges "a particular obligation" to Betterton, the celebrated actor, "for the most considerable part of the passages relating to this life, which I have here transmitted to the public; his veneration for the memory of Shakspeare having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great a veneration." Betterton, then, thus speaking through Rowe, says, "He was the son of Mr. John Shakspeare, and was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 1564. His family, as appears by the register and public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool,"&c. But Malone, in his posthumous 'Life' of the poet, has published a document which is held to be decisive as to this question. It is a record of proceedings in the Bailiff's Court in 1555, in which some process is shown to have been taken against John Shak yspere, of Stratford, glover. Malone has argued that this was a considerable branch of trade, and no doubt it was. But we are by no means certain that John Shak yspere the glover was the same person as the poet's father. There was another John Shakspere living in Stratford, who has been repeatedly mistaken for the more interesting butcher, woolman, or glover; and the mistake, we believe, has gone somewhat further than has been acknowledged. He was a younger man than the father of our poet, for he married in 1584. He was a shoemaker, as is proved by repeated entries in the books of the corporation. Might not his father have been the glover in 1555? Shakspere appears to have been one of the most common names in the town of Stratford; and we have also, as well as John, the shoemaker, Thomas, a butcher. About the same period William Shakspere's father is called a yeoman in one of the deeds relating to his property. We believe, as we shall presently show, that he was originally of the rank which is denominated gentleman at the present day; he was subsequently legally recognised as a gentleman, in the sense in which the word was used in former days. It was not incompatible with this opinion that he should be either a butcher or a dealer in wool. Whether he possessed any patrimonial property or not, be undoubtedly, by marriage, became the proprietor of an estate. He married, as we shall see, an heiress—a lady of ancient family. It was after this marriage that he was designated by some a butcher, by others a dealer in wool. There is a mode of reconciling these contradictory statements which has been overlooked by those who have been anxious to prove that Shakspere was not the son of a butcher. In Harrison's Description of England' we have an exact notice of the state of society at the precise time when John Shakspere, the possessor of landed property, was either a butcher or a woolman, or both. We have here a complaint of the exactions of landlords towards their tenants, particularly in the matter of demanding a premium on leases; and it thus proceeds: "But most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have any gain at all, that they themselves become graziers, BUTCHERS, tanners, SHEEPMASTERS, woodmen, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their own hands, leaving the commonalty, weak, or as an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in a time of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." The term "gentleman-farmer" was not invented in Harrison's time, or we should, we believe, have had a pretty correct description of the occupation of John Shakspere. But we have now to inquire who was the mother of William Shakspere? His father died in 1601. On the 9th of September, 1608, we have an entry in the Stratford register of burial, "Mary Shakspere, widow." We learn from an unquestionable document, a bill in chancery-of the date of November 24th, 1597,-that John Shakspere and Mary his wife were "lawfully seized in their demesne as of fee as in the right of the said Mary of and in one messuage and one yard land, with the appurtenances, lying and being in Wylnecote." In the will of Robert Arden, dated November 24th, 1556, we find," I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter Mary all my land in Willmecote, called Asbyes, and the crop upon the ground," &c. She was further left the sum of six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence. The grandfather of Mary Arden was groom of the chamber to Henry VII., and he was the nephew of Sir John Arden, squire of the body to the same king. Sir John Arden was a son of Walter Arden and of Eleanor, the daughter of John Hampden of Buckinghamshire. There were thus the ties of a common blood between William Shakspere and one of the most distinguished men of the next generation-John Hampden, who was a student in the Inner Temple when the poet died. Mary Arden's property has been computed to be worth some hundred and ten pounds of the money of her time. Let not the luxurious habits of the present age lead us to smile at such a fortune. All the worldly goods (except his lands) belonging to her father were in the inventory attached to his will valued at seventy-seven pounds eleven shillings and tenpence; and these goods included numerous oxen, bullocks, kine, horses, sheep, besides wheat in the field and in the barn. It is probable that Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakspere soon after her father's death, which was in 1556. She was the youngest daughter; and she no doubt married young, for under any circumstances she must have been an aged woman when she died in 1608. Of these parents, then, was William Shakspere born, in 1564, in the town of Stratford. In that town there is a street retaining its ancient name, Henley-street, being the road to Henleyin-Arden, where, in 1574, stood two houses with a garden and orchard annexed to each; and these houses were then purchased by John Shakspere. It is said that William Shakspere was born in one of these houses. His father may have inhabited the house before the purchase; and it is more than probable that he did, for at a court-leet in 1556 there is an entry of an assignment to him of the lease of a house in Henley-street, and of another in Greenhill-street, There is nothing to prove that the poet was not born in the house in Henley-street: and there that house still stands, altered according to modern fashion, its gable roofs destroyed,-divided and subdivided into smaller tenements,-part converted into a little inn, part the residence of a female who shows the room where it is alleged that Shakspere first saw the light, and the lowroofed kitchen where his mother taught him to read. We believe it all. The walls of that venerated bedroom are covered literally with thousands of names, inscribed in homage by pilgrims from every region where the glory of Shakspere is known. And there some of the greatest of those who have trodden, at whatever distance from him, the same, path, the Scotts, and Byrons, and Washington Irvings of our own day,have recorded their visits, amongst the multitude who have not lived in vain for themselves or others if they have drawn The above is a 'representation of the house in which Shakspere is said to have been born, as it was some twenty-five years ago. The centre, which is here represented as a butcher's shop, is not so used at the present time. We give an engraving at p. 16, from a drawing made about 1770, which exhibits a much more uniform appearance, showing that a very respectable family might not disdain to inhabit such a tenement even in our own day. At the time when Shakspere's father bought this house, it was, no doubt, a mansion as compared with the majority of houses in Stratford. There is an order from the Privy Council to the bailiff of Stratford, after a great fire which happened there in 1614, pointing out that fires had been very frequently occasioned there "by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combustible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without restraint." Stratford, like nearly every other town of England in that day, closely built, imperfectly drained, was subject to periodical visitations of the plague. From the average annual number of births and burials we may infer that the usual number of the inhabitants was about 1200. When William Shakspere was about two months old the plague broke out in this town, and, in the short space of six months, 238 persons, a fifth of the population, fell victims. The average annual mortality was about forty. No one of the family of Shakspere appears to have died during this visitation. One of the biographers of "the Bard of Avon," as he is pulingly called, says, "A poetical enthusiast will find no difficulty in believing that, like Horace, he reposed secure and fearless in the midst of contagion and death, protected by the Muses, to whom his future life was to be devoted." We desire to be poetical enthusiasts in matters which belong to poetry, but in this case we must be content to believe that the house in which the infant Shakspere was cradled was, compared with other houses, well ventilated and clean, that his family possessed sufficient of the necessaries and comforts of life, and that every proper precaution was taken to ward off the danger. In 1566 another son, Gilbert, was born. The head of this growing family was actively engaged, no doubt, in private and public duties. In 1568 John Shakspere became the bailiff, or chief magistrate, of Stratford. This office, during the period in which he held it, would confer rank upon him, in an age when the titles and degrees of men were attended to with great exactness. Malone says that, from the year 1569, the entries, either in the corporation-books or the parochial registers, referring to the father of the poet, bear the addition of master, and that this honour able distinction was in consequence of his having served the office of bailiff. We doubt this inference exceedingly. John Shakspere would not have acquired a permanent rank by having filled an annual office. But he did acquire that permanent rank in the year 1569, in the only way in which it could be legally acquired. A grant of arms was then made to him by Robert Cooke, Clarencieux. The grant itself is lost, but it was confirmed by Dethick, Garter King at Arms, and Camden, in 1599. That confirmation contains the following preamble: Being solicited, and by credible report informed, that John Shakspere, now of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gent., whose parent and greatgrandfather, late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince, King Henry VII., of famous memory, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements, given to him in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit; and for that the said John Shakspere having married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wellingcote, in the said county, and also produced this his ancient coat-of-arms, heretofore assigned to him whilst he was her majesty's officer and bailiff of that town: in consideration of the premises," &c. Nothing, we should imagine, could be clearer than this. John Shakspere produces his ancient coatof-arms, assigned to him whilst he was bailiff of Stratford; and he recites also that he married one of the heirs of Arden of Wellingcote. Garter and Clarencieux, in consequence, allow him to impale the arms of Shakspere with the ancient arms of Arden of Wellingcote. The Shakspere arms were actually derived from the family name; and we give a representation of the united arms as they were used in the seal of William Shakspere's daughter,-most probably it was his own seal: and yet Malone has a most elaborate argument to prove that the grant of arms was made entirely with reference to the circumstance that John Shakspere had married one of the daughters and heirs of Arden of Wellingcote. Such questions may appear frivolous and unworthy to be discussed in the notice of a man so elevated above the accidents of birth and station; and we may think of the words of another poet, one of Nature's own nobles, "A prince can mak a belted knight, Yet the subject is important in connexion with the education of Shakspere. A great deal of what would appear little |