With a privilege, rarely indulged even to the sons of genius, he had produced his admirable works without any throes or labour of the mind they had obtained for him all that he had asked from them, -the patronage of the great, the applause of the witty, and a competency of fortune adequate to the moderation of his desires. Having fulfilled, or, possibly, exceeded his expectations, they had discharged their duty; and he threw them altogether from his thought; and whether it were their destiny to emerge into renown, or to perish in the drawer of a manager; to be brought to light in a state of integrity, or to revisit the glimpses of the moon with a thousand mortal murders on their head, engaged no part of his solicitude or interest. They had given to him the means of casy life, and he sought from them nothing more. This insenstbility in our Author to the offspring of his brain

make them worse, are said to have been written after Combe's death. Steevens and Malone discredit the whole tale. The two frst lines, as given to us by Rowe, are unquestionably not Shakspeare's; and that any lasting enmity subsisted between these two bur hers of Stratford is disproved by the respective wills of the parties, Jolin Combe bequeathing five pounds to our Poet, and our Poet leaving his sword to John Combo's nephew and residuary legatee, John Combe himself being at that time deceased. With the two commentators above mentioned, I am inclined, therefore, on the whole, to reject the story as a fabrication; though I cannot, with Steevens, convict the lines of malignity; or think, with him and with Malone, that the character of Shakspeare, on the supposition of his being their author, could require any laboured vindication to clear it from stain. In the anecdote,

may be the subject of our wonder or admira-as related by Rowe, I can see nothing but a whimtion: but its consequences have been calamitous sical sally, breaking from the mind of one friend, to those who in after times have hung with delight and of a nature to excite a good-humoured smile on over his pages. On the intellect and the temper of the check of the other. In Aubrey's hands, the these ill-fated mortals it has inflicted a heavy load transaction assumes a somewhat darker com

of punishment in the dullness and the arrogance of commentators and illustrators in the conceit and petulance of Theobald; the imbecility of Capell; the pert and tasteless dogmatism of Steevens; the ponderous littleness of Malone and of Drake. Some superior men, it is true, have enlisted themselves in the cause of Shakspeare. Rowe, Pope, Warburton, Hanmer, and Johnson have successively been his editers; and have professed to give his scenes in their original purity to the world. But from some cause or other, which it is not our present business to explore, each of these editors, in his turn, has disappointed the just expectations of the public; and, with an inversion of Nature's general rule, the little men have finally prevailed

plexion; and the worse verses, as written after the death of their subject, may justly be branded as malevolent, and as discovering enmity in the heart of their writer. But I have dwelt too long upon a topic which, in truth, is undeserving of a syllable; and if I were tolinger on it any longer, for the purpose of exhibiting Malone's reasons for his preference of Aubrey's copy of the epitaph to Rowe's, and his discovery of the propriety and beauty of the single Ho in the last line of Aubrey's, as Ho is the abbreviation of Hobgoblin, one of the names of Robin Good-fellow, the fairy servant of Oberon, my readers would have just cause to complain of me, as sporting with their time and their patience.

On the 9th of July, 1614, Stratford was ravaged

against the great. The blockheads have hooted by a fire, which destroyed fifty-four dwelling-houses

the wits from the field; and, attaching themselves to the mighty body of Shakspeare, like barnacles to the hull of a proud man of war, they are prepared to plough with him the vast ocean of time; and thus, by the only means in their power, to snatch themselves from that oblivion to which Nature had devoted them. It would be unjust, however, to defraud these gentlemen of their proper praise. They have read for men of talents; and, by their gross labour in the mine, they have accumulated materials to be arranged and polished by the hand of the finer artist. Some apology may be necessary for this short digression from the more immediate subject of my biography. But the three or four years, which were passed by Shakspeare in the peaceful retirement of New Place are not distinguished by any traditionary anecdote deserving of our record; and the chasm may not improperly be supplied with whatever stands in contiguity with it. I should pass in silence, as too trifling for notice, the story of our Poet's extempore and jocular epitaph on John Combe, a rich townsman of Stratford, and a noted money-lender, if my readers would not object

besides barns and out-offices. It abstained, however, from the property of Shakspeare; and he had only to commiserate the losses of his neighbours. With his various powers of pleasing; his wit and his humour; the gentleness of his manners; the flow of his spirits and his fancy; the variety of anecdote with which his mind must have been stored; his knowledge of the world, and his intimacy with man, in every gradation of the society, from the prompter of a playhouse to the peer and the sovereign, Shakespeare must have been a delightful -nay, a fascinating companion; and his acquaintance must necessarily have been courted by all the prime inhabitants of Stratford and its vicinity. But over this, as over the preceding periods of his life, brood silence and oblivion; and in our total ignorance of his intimacies and friendships, we must apply to our imagination to furnish out his convivial board where intellect presided, and delight, with admiration, gave the applause.

On the 2d of February, 1615-16, he married his youngest daughter, Judith, then in the thirtyfirst year of her age, to Thomas Quincy, a vintner

to me that I had omitted an anecdote which had in Stratford; and on the 25th of the succeeding been honoured with a place in every preceding bio- month he executed his will. He was then, as it graphy of my author. As the circumstance is re- would appear, in the full vigour and enjoyment of lated by Rowe, "In a pleasant conversation among life; and we are not informed that his constitution their common friends, Mr. Combe told Shakspeare, had been previously weakened by the attack of any

in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph if he happened to outlive him: and, since he could not know what might be said of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately: upon which Shakspeare gave him these four verses:

Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved:
Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man ask, who lies in this tomb:

Ho! Ho! quoth the devil, 'tis my John a Combe.

But the sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so severely that he never forgave it." By Aubrey the story is differently told; and the lines in question, with some alterations, which evidently

malady. But his days, or rather his hours, were now all numbered; for he breathed his last on the 23d of the ensuing April, on that anniversary of his birth which completed his fifty-second year. It would bo gratifying to our curiosity to know something of the disease, which thus prematurely terminated the life of this illustrious man: but the secret is withheld from us; and it would be idle to endeavour to obtain it. We may be certain that Dr. Hall, who was a physician of considerable eminence, attended his father-in-law in his last illness; and Dr. Hall kept a register of all the remarkable cases, with their symptoms and treatment, which in the course of his practice had fallen under his observation. This curious MS., which had escaped the enmity of time, was obtained by Malone: but the recorded cases in

it most unfortunately began with the year 1617; and the preceding part of the register, which most probably had been in existence, could no where be found. The mortal complaint, therefore, of William Shakspeare is likely to remain for ever unknown; and as darkness had closed upon his path through life, so darkness now gathered round his bed of death, awfully to cover it from the eyes of succeeding generations.

On the 25th of April, 1616, two days after his decease, he was buried in the chancel of the church of Stratford; and at some period within the seven subsequent years, (for in 1623 it is noticed in the verses of Leonard Digges,) a monument was raised to his memory either by the respect of his townsmen, or by the piety of his relations. It represents the Poet with a countenance of thought, resting on a cushion and in the act of writing. It is placed under an arch, between two Corinthian columns of black marble, the capitals and bases of which are gilt. The face is said, but, as far as I can find, not on any adequate authority, to have been modelled from the face of the deceased; and the whole was painted, to bring the imitation nearer to nature. The face and the hands wore the carnation of life: the eyes were light hazel: the hair and beard were auburn: a black gown, without sleeves, hung loosely over a scarlet doublet. The cushion in its upper part was green: in its lower, crimson; and the tassels were of gold colour. This certainly was not in the high classical taste; though we may learn from Pausanias that statues in Greece were sometimes coloured after life; but as it was the work of contemporary hands, and was intended, by those who knew the Poet, to convey to posterity some resemblance of his lineaments and dress, it was a monument of rare value; and the tastelessness of Malone, who caused all its tints to be obliterated with a daubing of white lead, cannot be sufficiently ridiculed and condemned. Its material is a species of free-stone; and as the chisel of the sculptor was most probably under the guidance of Doctor Hall, it bore some promise of likeness to the mighty dead. Immediately below the cushion is the following distich :

Judicio Pylium; genio Socratem; arte Maronem
Terra tegit; populus mœret; Olympus habet.

On a tablet underneath are inscribed these lines :

Stay, passenger, why dost thou go so fast?
Read, if thou can'st, whom envious death has placed
Within this monument-Shakspeare; with whom
Quick Nature died; whose name doth deck the tomb
Far more than cost: since all that he hath writ

Leaves living art but page to serve his wit:

and the flat stone, covering the grave, holds out, in very irregular characters, a supplication to the reader, with the promise of a blessing and the menace

of a curse:

Good Friend! for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones;
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

The last of these inscriptions may have been written
by Shakspeare himself under the apprehension of
his bones being tumbled, with those of many of his
townsmen, into the charnel-house of the parish.
But his dust has continued unviolated, and is likely
to remain in its holy repose till the last awful scene
of our perishable globe. It were to be wished that
the two preceding inscriptions were more worthy,
than they are, of the tomb to which they are at
tached. It would be gratifying if we could give any
faith to the tradition, which asserts that the bust of
this monument was sculptured from a cast moulded
on the face of the departed poet; for then we might
assure ourselves that we possess one authentic re-
semblance of this pre-eminently intellectual mortal.
But the cast, if taken, must have been taken im-
modiately after his death; and we know neither at

whose expense the monument was constructed;
nor by whose hand it was executed; nor at what
precise time it was erected. It may have been
wrought by the artist, acting under the recollections
of the Shakspeare family into some likeness of the
great townsman of Stratford; and on this proba-
bility, we may contemplate it with no inconside-
rable interest. I cannot, however, persuade my-
self that the likeness could have been strong. Tho
forehead, indeed, is sufficiently spacious and intel-
lectual: but there is a disproportionate length in the
under part of the face: the mouth is weak; and
the whole countenance is heavy and inert. Not
having seen the monument itself, I can speak of it
only from its numerous copies by the graver; and by
these it is possible that I may be deceived. But if we
cannot rely on the Stratford bust for a resemblance
of our immortal dramatist, where are we to look
with any hope of finding a trace of his features? It
is highly probable that no portrait of him was paint-
ed during his life; and it is certain that no portrait of
him, with an incontestible claim to genuineness, is
at present in existence. The fairest title to au-
thenticity seems to be assignable to that which is
called the Chandos portrait; and is now in the col-
lection of the Duke of Buckingham, at Stowe. The
possession of this picture can be distinctly traced
up to Betterton and Davenant. Through the hands
of successive purchasers, it became the property
of Mr. Robert Keck. On the marriage of the heir-
ess of the Keck family, it passed to Mr. Nicholl, of
Colney-Hatch, in Middlesex: on the union of this
gentleman's daughter with the Duke of Chandos, it
found a place in that nobleman's collection; and,
finally, by the marriage of the present Duke of
Buckingham with the Lady Anne Elizabeth Brydges,
the heiress of the house of Chandos, it has settled
in the gallery of Stowe. This was pronounced by
the late Earl of Orford, (Horace Walpole,) as we
are informed by Mr. Granger, to be the only origi-
nal picture of Shakspeare. But two others, if not
more, contend with it for the palm of originality; one,
which in consequence of its having been in the pos-
session of Mr. Felton, of Drayton, in the county of
Salop, from whom it was purchased by the Boydells,
has been called the Felton Shakspeare; and one, a
miniature, which, by some connection, as I believe,
with the family of its proprietors, found its way into
the cabinet of the late Sir James Lamb, more gene--
rally, perhaps, known by his original name of James
Bland Burgess. The first of these pictures was
reported to have been found at the Boar's Head in
Eastcheap, one of the favourite haunts, as it was
erroneously called, of Shakspeare and his compa-
nions; and the second by a tradition, in the family
of Somervile the poet, is affirmed to have been
drawn from Shakspeare, who sate for it at the pres-
sing instance of a Somervile, one of his most inti-
mate friends. But the genuineness of neither of
these pictures can be supported under a rigid in-
vestigation; and their pretensions must yield to
those of another rival portrait of our Poet, which
was once in the possession of Mr. Jennens, of Gop-
sal in Leicestershire, and is now the property of
that liberal and literary nobleman, the Duke of
Somerset. For the authenticity of this portrait,
attributed to the pencil of Cornelius Jansenn, Mr.
Boaden* contends with much zeal and ingenuity.
Knowing that some of the family of Lord South-
ampton, Shakspeare's especial friend and patron,
had been painted by Jansenn, Mr. Boaden spe-
ciously infers that, at the Earl's request, his favourite
dramatist had, likewise, allowed his face to this
painter's imitation; and that the Gopsal portrait,
the result of the artist's skill on this occasion, had
obtained a distinguished place in the picture-gallery
of the noble Earl. This, however, is only unsup-
ported assertion, and the mere idleness of conjec-
ture. It is not pretended to be ascertained that the
Gopsal portrait was ever in the possession of Shak-

An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Pictures and
Prints offered as Portraits of Shakrocare, p. 07-50.

apeare's illustrious friend; and its transfers, during | poetic palm. I have already cited Chettles let me the hundred and thirty-seven years, which inter- now cite Jonson, from whose pages much more of posed between the death of Southampton, in 1624, a similar nature might be adduced. "I loved," he

and the time of its emerging from darkness at Gop-
sal, in 1761, are not made the subjects even of a
random guess. On such evidence, therefore, if
evidence it can be called, it is impossible for us to
receive, with Mr. Boaden, the Gopsal picture as a
genuine portrait of Shakspeare. We are now as-
sured that it was from the Chandos portrait Sir
Godfrey Kneller copied the painting which he pre-
sented to Dryden, a poet inferior only to him whose
portrait constituted the gift. The beautiful verses,
with which the poet requited the kind attention of
the painter, are very generally known: but many
may require to be informed that the present, made
on this occasion by the great master of the pen-
cil to the greater master of the pen, is still in
existence, preserved no doubt by the respect felt to
be due to the united names of Kneller, Dryden,
and Shakspeare; and is now in the collection of
Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Castle. The ori-
ginal painting, from which Droeshout drew the copy
for his engraving, prefixed to the first folio edition
of our Poet's dramas, has not yet been discovered;
and I feel persuaded that no original painting ever
existed for his imitation; but that the artist worked
in this instance from his own recollection, assisted
probably by the suggestions of the Poet's theatric
friends. We are, indeed, strongly of opinion that
Shakspeare, remarkable, as he seems to have been,
for a lowly estimate of himself, and for a carelessness
of all personal distinction, would not readily submit
his face to be a painter's study, to the loss of hours,
which he might more usefully or more pleasurably
assign to reading, to composition, or to conviviality.
If any sketch of his features was made during his
life, it was most probably taken by some rapid and
unprofessional pencil, when the Poet was unaware
of it; or, taken by surprise, and exposed by it to
no inconvenience, was not disposed to resist it.
We are convinced that no authentic portrait of this
great man has yet been produced, or is likely to be
discovered; and that we must not therefore hope
to be gratified with any thing which we can contem-
plate with confidence as a faithful representation of
his countenance. The head of the statue, executed
by Scheemaker, and erected, in 1741, to the honour
of our poet in Westminster Abbey, was sculptured
after a mezzotinto, scraped by Simon nearly twenty
years before, and said to be copied from an origi-
nal portrait, by Zoust. But as this artist was not
known by any of his productions in England till
the year 1657, no original portrait of Shakspeare
could be drawn by his pencil; and, consequently,
the marble chiselled by Scheemaker, under the
direction of Lord Burlington, Pope, and Mead,
cannot lay any claim to an authorized resemblance
to the man, for whom it was wrought. We must
be satisfied, therefore, with knowing, on the au-
thority of Aubrey, that our Poet "was a handsome,
well-shaped man;" and our imagination must sup-
ply the expansion of his forehead, the sparkle and
flash of his eyes, the sense and good-temper play-
ing round his mouth; the intellectuality and the
benevolence mantling over his whole countenance.

says in his 'Discoveries, "I loved the man, and do
honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much
as any. He was, indeed, honest, of an open and
free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions
and gentle expressions," &c. &c. When Jonson
apostrophizes his deceased friend, he calls him,
"My gentle Shakspeare," and the title of "the
sweet swan of Avon," so generally given to him,
after the example of Jonson, by his contemporaries,
seems to have been given with reference as much
to the suavity of his temper as to the harmony of
his verse. In their dedication of his works to the
Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, his fellows,
Heminge and Condell, profess that their great ob-
ject in their publication was "only to keep the
memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as
was our Shakspeare:" and their preface to the
public appears evidently to have been dictated by
their personal and affectionate attachment to their
departed friend. If we wish for any further evi-
dence in the support of the moral character of
Shakspeare, we may find it in the friendship of South-
ampton; we may extract it from the pages of his
immortal works. Dr. Johnson, in his much over-
praised Preface, seems to have taken a view, very
different from ours, of the morality of our author's
scenes. He says, "His (Shakspeare's) first defect
is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in
books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to conve-
nience; and is so much more careful to please than
to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral
purpose. From his writings, indeed, a system of
moral duty may be selected," (indeed!) "but his
precepts and axioms drop casually from him:"
(Would the preface-writer have wished the drama-
tist to give a connected treatise on ethics like the
offices of Cicero?) "he makes no just distribution
of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in
the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked: he
carries his persons indifferently through right and
wrong; and at the close dismisses them without
further care, and leaves their examples to operate
by chance. This fault the barbarity of the age can-
not extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to
make the world better, and justice is a virtue inde-
pendent on time or place." Why this commonplace
on justice should be compelled into the station in
which we here most strangely find it, I cannot for
my life conjecture. But absurd as it is made by its
association in this place, it may not form an im-
proper conclusion to a paragraph which means little,
and which, intending censure, confers dramatic
praise on a dramatic writer. It is evident, however,
that Dr. Johnson, though he says that a system of
moral duty may be selected from Shakspeare's
writings, wished to inculcate that his scenes were
not of a moral tendency. On this topic, the first
and the greater Jonson seems to have entertained
very different sentiments-

It is well that we are better acquainted with the rectitude of his morals, than with the symmetry of his features. To the integrity of his heart; the gentleness and benignity of his manners, we have the positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson; the former of whom seems to have been drawn, by our Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the faction of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his love and admiration of the man, to have lost all his natural jealousy of the successful competitor for the

I derive my knowledge on this topic from Malone; for till I saw the fact asserted in his page, I was not

aware that the picture in question had been preserved
amid the wreck of poor Dryden's property. On the au-
thority also of Malone and of Mr. Boaden, I speak of

Sir Godfrey's present to Dryden as of a copy from the
Chandos portrait.

"Look, how the father's face

(says this great man)

Lives in his issue; even so the race

Of Shakspeare's mind and manners, brightly shines
In his well-torned and truefiled lines."

We think, indeed, that his scenes are rich in ster.
ling morality, and that they must have been the effu-
sions of a moral mind. The only crimination of his
morals must be drawn from a few of his sonnets;
and from a story first suggested by Anthony Wood,
and afterwards told by Oldys on the authority of
Betterton and Pope. From the Sonnets* we can
collect nothing more than that their writer was
blindly attached to an unprincipled woman, who
preferred a young and beautiful friend of his to him-
self. But the story told by Oldys presents some-
See Son. 141, 144, 147, 151, 152.

thing to us of a more tangible nature; and as it
possesses some intrinsic merit as a story, and rests,
as to its principal facts, on the authority of Wood,
who was a native of Oxford and a veracious, man,
we shall not hesitate, after the example of most of
the recent biographers of our Poet, to relate it, and
in the very words of Oldys. "If tradition may be
trusted, Shakspeare often baited at the Crown Inn
or Tavern in Oxford, on his journey to and from
London. The landlady was a beautiful woman and
of a sprightly wit; and her husband, Mr. John
Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city,) a grave,
melancholy man, who, as well as his wife, used
much to delight in Shakspeare's pleasant company.
Their son, young Will Davenant (afterwards Sir
William Davenant) was then a little schoolboy, in
the town, of about seven or eight years old; and so
fond also of Shakspeare that, whenever he heard of
his arrival, he would fly from school to see him.
One day, an old townsman, observing the boy run-
ning homeward almost out of breath, asked him
whither he was posting in that heat and hurry. Ho
answered, to see his god-father, Shakspeare. There
is a good boy, said the other; but have a care
that you don't take God's name in vain! This story

Mr. Pope told me at the Earl of Oxford's table,
upon occasion of some discourse which arose about
Shakspeare's monument, then newly erected in
Westminster Abbey."

one

On these two instances of his frailty, under the
influence of the tender passion,
of them sup-
ported by his own evidence, and one resting on au-
thority which seems to be not justly questionable,
depend all the charges which can be brought against
the strict personal morality of Shakspeare. In these
days of peculiarly sensitive virtue, he would not
possibly be admitted into the party of the saints:
but, in the age in which he lived, these errors of his
human weakness did not diminish the respect, com-
manded by the probity of his heart; or the love,
conciliated by the benignity of his manners; or the
admiration exacted by the triumph of his genius. I
blush with indignation when I relate that an offence,
of a much more foul and atrocious nature, has been
suggested against him by a critic* of the present
day, on the pretended testimony of a large number
of his sonnets. But his own proud character, which
raised him high in the estimation of his contempo-
raries, sufficiently vindicates him from this abomi-
nable imputation. It is admitted that one hundred
and twenty of these little poems are addressed to a
male, and that in the language of many of them
love is too strongly and warmly identified with
friendship. But in the days of Shakspeare love and
friendship were almost synonymous terms. In the
Merchant of Venice, † Lorenzo speaking of Antonio
to Portia, says,

"But if you knew to whom you show this honour,
How true a gentleman you send relief to;
How dear a lover of my lord, your husband," &c.

and Portia, in her reply calls Antonio "the bosom lover
of her lord." Drayton, in a letter to his friend,
Drummond of Hawthornden, tells him that Mr. Jo-
seph Davies is in love with him; and Ben Jonson
concludes a letter to Dr. Donne by professing him-
self as ever his true lover. Many more instances of the
same perverted language might be educed from the
writings of that gross and indelicate age; and I
have not a doubt that Shakspeare, without exposing
himself to the hazard of suspicion, employed this
authorized dialect of his time to give the greater
glow to these addresses to his young friend. But
who was this young friend? The question has fre-
quently been asked; and never once been even
speciously answered. I would as readily believe,
with the late Mr. G. Chalmers, that this object of
our author's poetic ardour, was Queen Elizabeth,
changed for the particular purpose, like the Iphis of

the Roman poet, into a man, as I would be induced to think, with the writer "On Shakspeare and his Times," that these familiar and fervent addresses were made to the proud and the lofty Southampton. Neither can I persuade myself, with Malone, that the friend and the mistress are the mere creatures of our Poet's imagination, raised for the sport of his muse, and without "a local habitation or a name." They were, unquestionably, realities: but who they were must for ever remain buried in inscrutable mystery. That those addressed to his male friend are not open to the infamous interpretation, affixed to them by the monthly critic, may be proved, as I persuade myself, to demonstration. The odious vice to which we allude, was always in England held in merited detestation; and would our Poct consent to be the publisher of his own shame? to become a sort of outcast from society? to be made

"A fixed figure for the hand of time

To point his slow, unmoving finger at??

4

If the sonnets in question were not actually published by him, he refrained to guard them from manuseript distribution; and they soon, as night be expected, found their way to the press; whence they were rapidly circulated, to the honour of his poetry and not to the discredit of his morals. So pure was he from the disgusting vice, imputed to him, for the first time, in the nineteenth century, that be alludes to it only once (if my recollection be at all accurate) in all his voluminous works; and that i where the foul-mouthed Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida, calls Patroclus "Achilles's masculine whore." Under all the circumstances of the case, therefore, that these sonnets should be the effusions of sexual love is incredible, inconceivable, impossible; and we must turn away from the injurious suggestion with honest abhorrence and disdain.

The Will of Shakspeare, giving to his youngest daughter, Judith, not more than three hundred pounds, and a piece of plate, which probably was valuable, as it is called by the testator, "My broad silver and gilt bowl," assigns almost the whole of his

property to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, and
her husband; whom he appoints to be bis executors.
The cause of this evident partiality in the father
appears to be discoverable in the higher mental ac-
complishments of the elder daughter; who is re-
ported to have resembled him in her intellectual
endowments, and to have been eminently distin-
guished by the piety and the Christian benevolence
which actuated her conduct. Having survived her
estimable husband fourteen years, she died on the
11th of July, 1649; and the inscription on her tomb,
preserved by Dugdale, commemorates her intellec-
tual superiority, and the influence of religion upon
her heart. This inscription, which we shall tran-
scribe, bears witness also, as we must observe, to
the piety of her illustrious father.

Witty above her sex; but that's not all:
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Some thiet of Shakspeare was in that; but this
Wholly of him, with whom she's now in bliss.
Then, passenger, bast ne'er a tear

To weep with her, that wept with all?
That wert, yet set herself to cheer
Them up with w comforts cordial.
Her love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou hast ne'er a tear to shed.

As Shakspeare's last will and testament will be
printed at the end of this biography, we may refer
our readers to that document for all the minor lega-
cies which it bequeaths; and may pass imraediately
to an account of our great Poet's family, as far as it
can be given from records which are authentic.
Judith, his younger daughter, bore to her husband,
Thomas Quincy, three sons; Shakspeare, who
died in his infancy, Richard and Thomas, who de-
ceased, the first in his 21st year, the last in his 19th,

unmarried and before their mother; who, having | Whatever is in any degree associated with the reached her 77th year, expired in February, 1661-2 personal history of Shakspeare is weighty with gen-being buried on the 9th of that month. She ap-eral interest. The circumstance of his birth can pears either not to have received any education, or impart consequence even to a provincial town; and not to have profited by the lessons of her teachers, for to a deed, still in existence, she affixes her

mark.

We have already mentioned the dates of the birth, marriage, and death of Susanna Hall. She left only one daughter, Elizabeth, who was baptized on the 21st of February, 1607-8, eight years before her grandfather's decease, and was married on the 22d of April, 1626, to Mr. Thomas Nash, a country gentleman, as it appears, of independent fortune. Two years after the death of Mr. Nash, who was buried on the 5th of April, 1647, she married on the 5th of June, 1649, at Billesley in Warwickshire, Sir John Barnard, Knight, of Abington, a small village in the vicinity of Northampton. She died, and was

we are not unconcerned in the past or the present fortunes of the place, over which hovers the glory of his name. But the house, in which he passed the last three or four years of his life, and in which he terminated his mortal labours, is still more engaging to our imaginations, as it is more closely and personally connected with him. Its history, therefore, must not be omitted by us; and if in some respects, we should differ in it from the narrative of Malone, we shall not be without reasons sufficient to justify the deviations in which we indulge. New Place, then, which was not thus first named by Shakspeare, was built in the reign of Henry VII., by Sir Hugh Clopton, Kt., the younger son of an old family resident near Stratford, who had filled

buried at Abington, on the 17th of February, 1669-70; in succession the offices of Sheriff and of Lord

and, as she left no issue by either of her husbands, ner death terminated the lineal descendants of Shakspeare. His collateral kindred have been indulged with a much longer period of duration; the descendants of his sister, Joan, having continued in a regular succession of generations even to our days; whilst none of them, with a single exception, have broken from that rank in the community in which their ancestors, William Hart and Joan Shakspeare united their unostentatious fortunes in the year 1599. The single exception to which we allude is that of Charles Hart, believed, for good reasons, to be the son of William the eldest son of William and Joan Hart, and, consequently, the grand-nephew of our Poet. At the early age of seventeen, Charles Hart, as lieutenant in Prince Rupert's regiment, fought at the battle of Edgehill: and, subsequently betaking himself to the stage, he became the most renowned tragic actor of his time. "What Mr. Hart delivers," says Rymer, (I adopt the citation from the page of Malone,) "every one takes upon content: their eyes are prepossessed and charmed by his action before aught of the poet's can approach their ears; and to the most wretched of characters he gives a lustre and brilliancy, which dazzles the sight that the deformities in the poetry cannot be perceived." "Were I a poet," (says another contemporary writer,) "nay a Fletcher or a Shakspeare, I would quit my own title to immortality so that one actor might never die. This I may modestly say of him (nor is it my particular opinion, but the sense of all mankind) that the best tragedies on the English stage have received their lustre from Mr. Hart's performance: that he has left such an impression behind him, that no less than the interval of an age can make them appear again with half their majesty from any second hand." This was a brilliant eruption from the family of Shakspeare; but as it was the first so it appears to have been the last; and the Harts have ever since, as far at least as it is known to us, "pursued the noiseless tenor of their way," within the precincts of their native town on the banks of the soft-flowing Avon.*

• By intelligence, on the accuracy of which I can rely, and which has only just reached me, from the birth place of Shakspeare, I learn that the family of the Harts, after a course of lineal descents during the revolution of two hundred and twenty-six years, is now on the verge of extinction; an aged woman, who retains in single blessedness her maiden name of Hart, being at this time (Nov. 1825) its sole surviving representative, For some years she occupied the house of her ancestors, is which Shakspeare is reported to have first seen the Eight; and here she obtained a comfortable subsistence by showing the antiquities of the venerated mansion to the numerous strangers who were attracted to it. Being dispossessed of this residence by the rapaciousness of its proprietor, she settled herself in a dwelling nearly opposize to it. Here she still lives; and continues to exhibit some relics, not reputed to be genuine, of the mighty bard, with whom her maternal ancestor was nourished in the same womb. She regards herself also as a dramatic poet; and, in support of her pretensions, she produces the rude sketch of a play, uninformed, as it is

Mayor of London. In 1563 it was sold by one of the Clopton family to William Bott; and by him it was again sold in 1570 to William Underhill, (the purchaser and the seller being both of the rank of esquires) from whom it was bought by our Poet in 1597. By him it was bequeathed to his daughter, Susanna Hall; from whom it descended to her only child, Lady Barnard. In the June of 1643, this Lady, with her first husband Mr. Nash, entertained, for nearly three weeks, at New Place, Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I., when, escorted by Prince Rupert and a large body of troops, she was on her progress to meet her royal consort, and to proceed with him to Oxford. On the death of Lady Barnard without children, New Place was sold, in 1675,† to Sir Edward Walker, Kt., Garter King at Arms; by whom it was left to his only child, Barbara, married to Sir John Clopton, Kt., of Clopton in the parish of Stratford. On his demise, it became the property of a younger son of his, Sir Hugh Clopton, Kt., (this family of the Cloptons seems to have been peculiarly prolific in the breed of knights,) by whom it was repaired and decorated at a very large éxpense. Malone affirms that it was pulled down by him, and its place supplied by a more sumptuous edifice. If this statement were correct, the crime of its subsequent dostroyer would be greatly extenuated; and the hand which had wielded the axe against the hallowed mulberry tree, would be absolved from the second act, imputed to it, of sacrilegious violence. But Malone's acccount is, unquestionably, erroneous. In the May of 1742, Sir Hugh entertained Garrick, Macklin, and Delany under the shade of the Shakspearian mulberry. On the demise of Sir Hught in the December of 1751, New Place was sold by his son-in-law and executor, Henry Talbot, the Lord Chancellor Talbot's brother, to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire; by whom, on some quarrel with the magistrates on the subject of the parochial assessments, it was razed to the ground, and its site abandoned to vacancy. On this completion of his outragess against the memory of Shakspeare, which his unlucky possession of wealth enabled him to

said, with any of the vitality of genius. For this information I am indebted to Mr. Charles Fellows, of Nottingham; who with the characteristic kindness of his most estimable family, sought for the intelligence which was required by me, and obtained it.

† Malone gives a different account of some of the transfers of New Place. According to him, it passed by sale, on the death of Lady Barnard, to Edward Nash, the cousin-german of that Lady's first husband; and, by him, was bequeathed to his daughter Mary, the wife of Sir Reginald Foster; from whom it was bought by Sir John Clopton, who gave it by deed to his youngest son, Sir Hugh. But the deed, which conveyed New Place to Sir Edward Walker, is still in existence; and has been published by R. B. Wheeler, the historian of Stratford.

+ Sir Hugh Clopton was knighted by George I. He was a barrister at law; and died in the December of 1751, at the advanced age of eighty.-Malone.

§ Our days, also, have witnessed a similar profanation of the relics of genius; not, indeed, of genius