before this acting the part of a regular farmer there, selling malt, and prosecuting for debts contracted in corn. Edmund Burke, the Shakspeare of statesmen, was as great amongst the turnips and hayricks of Beaconsfield as on the floor of St Stephen's; and Shakspeare could walk in from a sale of malt, and sit down to write the caldron scene in "Macbeth." When not at his farm himself, he had his brother Gilbert as his representative. Richard, another brother, was also resident in Stratford, where he died a year before the poet. His youngest brother, Edmund, had become, under William, a player in London, and died in 1607.

In 1608, there is evidence, from a case of jurisdiction in reference to the playhouse, which came on before Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, that Shakspeare had become the chief proprietor, next to Richard Burbage, of the Blackfriars' theatre. His income, from that source alone, amounted to at least two hundred pounds. He derived a similar sum from the Globe. Altogether, he was worth four or five hundred a-year, which some reckon equivalent to five or six times the value in our present money (to £3000); so that if this be true, Shakspeare, next to Scott, Rogers, and Byron, must have been the richest of recorded poets.

In 1609, he published that strange book "The Sonnets," some of which had been written as early as 1598. We have something to say afterwards on their poetical merit. To discuss the many questions connected with their object, or objects, would exhaust a volume. Some have supposed them addressed to a male, and that male has been vainly sought in the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Pembroke, one W. Hughes, and (credat Judæus !) Queen Elizabeth, transformed for the nonce into a man. Some have supposed them addressed to a beautiful dissolute female, with whom Shakspeare was, it is said, infatuatedly in love. This theory is, we have reason to know, very ably supported in an unpublished treatise by an eminent Scotchman, a professor of literature in London. (We trust, whatever be its effect on Shakspeare's reputation, that this essay will yet be given to the world.) Some have thought these Sonnets are arranged according to a definite,

although shadowy, plan, while others maintain that they are quite disjointed and fragmentary; some that they are all addressed to one individual, and others that they are addressed to various persons; some that they are substantially real, and others that they are entirely fictitious. We incline, so far as our present light goes, to that theory which would save Shakspeare's character, although at the expense of the artistic coherence of his Sonnets. These seem the records of a vast number of moods, some his own, and some assumed, which have been thrown at haphazard, and without any order, as if into a common receptacle; and they constitute when taken out and read a mere chaos-although it be a chaos of interest and poetic beauty. It is most singular how the mystery, which more or less shrouds Shakspeare's entire history, should have intensified into a very blackness of darkness over the only work of his which partakes of an autobiographical character. This much we gather from them-as indeed the perusal of some of his plays might have also taught us-that although our poet's career outwardly was quiet and successful, there were strange experiences, dark trials, Hecla springs of passion, chagrin, and disappointment, working wildly under the smooth surface, and forcing at times a convulsive and terrible outlet. Under the bosom of the "Gentle Willy," as under the green earth, his "mighty mother," there lay many fearful and unsounded abysses and seas of central flame.

Yet few men, on the whole, seem to have enjoyed life better than our poet. He is said to have been in general sociable, frank, warm-hearted, and witty; and at the Mermaid Cluba club instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh-he, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other famous men of the time, engaged in wit contests of the most brilliant and memorable kind. Fuller, who witnessed them, compares Ben Jonson to a great Spanish galleon, filled with a richer freight of learning, and more solid, but slower in his performances; while Shakspeare was an English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, and better at tacking about and taking advantage of all winds. Between these two wits, contrary to what used to be the common opinion, there seems to have existed a good feeling. As with Scott and

Byron, and also with Wordsworth and Southey, while minor writers were envying and maligning, biting and devouring one another, they felt themselves so far superior to all the rest, as to entertain no jealousy or rivalship among themselves. It is the fierce fires of quite a lower region of the atmosphere which contest superiority, and rend the clouds in lightning; the stars, serene above the thunder-storm, smile to each other across the gulphs of space, and exchange nothing but glances of emulous and everlasting love.

To Stratford, at last, Shakspeare determined to retire. He had laid past an ample provision for probably the remaining part of his life. He was sick of the stage. He had never much liked or enjoyed much success in the work of the mere actor: here, as Scott in speech making, Burke in verse writing, and Byron in parliamentary oratory, Shakspeare was only a common man, and seems to have generally enacted secondary characters, such as the Ghost in "Hamlet," and the Old Adam in "As You Like It." His heart, too, we have seen, was always in his native town, and there now was his treasure also. It is generally said that he did not retire till 1613, and that he spent three years of perfect leisure amongst his native woods and dales. Others, however, have maintained that he withdrew himself from London in 1604, although he continued to write two plays each year for the stage, and reaped the profits accordingly. These plays are supposed to have been"Lear," "Macbeth," "Timon of Athens," "Troilus and Cressida," "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest," "Henry VIII.," "Coriolanus," "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," precisely the most powerful, varied, and matured of all his productions.

Supposing this to be the true history of his later years, how interesting! Our poet, in the very prime of life, just forty years of age, with few gray hairs, and with many laurels on his head-happy in his family-wealthy in his circumstances, leaves London without a sigh for his native town, carrying with him at the same time the most glorious literary projects as work for the maturity of his manhood. He sits quietly

down in his house called New Place-he overlooks his fields

he plants his famous mulberry-tree-he revisits all the haunts of his boyhood-he is found at one time presiding over his reapers, again frequenting the sales of corn and of malt, and anon attending the meetings of the magistrates of the little town—and in the evenings, according to his mood, he either hies to the ale-house and smokes his pipe and drinks his pot, and enjoys the humours of the Dogberries or the Slenders of the place, or when the spirit of inspiration is felt hovering near him, he shuts himself up in his chamber, and is heard, now in tragic tones uttering aloud the words in Lear"Ye Heavens, if ye do love old men,

If ye yourselves are old,

Avenge me of my daughters,"

and now laughing "wild laughters three," as he cries with the cunning Autolycus in the Winter's Tale, "Oh, that I had never been born!" or sings to himself that immortal pedlar's inimitable doggrel

"Masks for faces and for noses," &c.

One day (it is mythically supposed by an ingenious writer) he is bilious, probably after a field-night with some of the Toby Belches of the town, and cannot write a bit. A Euphuist of his acquaintance has just called, and the poet confesses his plight, and proposes to remedy it by swallowing a pill. "What!" exclaims the Euphuist, "make the Swan of Avon dependent upon a drug. Insult to the immortal soul to suppose that aught so basely material is needed to clear its divine eyesight, or to quicken its heavenward flight!" "Nevertheless," rejoins Shakspeare, tapping the shoulder of his enthusiastic friend, "we'll try the pill;" and that very night the fair island of Miranda, the loveliest of all human imaginations, appears on his page, and glorifies it far more than if a shower of fairy gold had dropped on it from above. News, too, are ever and anon reaching him from the far city of the great triumphs of his other and his other new play; and his heart within him is glad. Occasional trips to London diversify his life, and thus, smoothly on the whole, glide away the last delightful years of this greatest of the sons of men.

Some calamities, indeed, there are to darken this bright tissue. In 1608 his good old mother died, and in 1613 his brother Richard. A fire in 1614 breaks out in the town, does great damage, and must excite Shakspeare's keen commiseration. He is found at this time busy about a project for the enclosure of the common fields of Stratford, and is consulted on that and other matters as the most public-spirited man in the town.

The year 1616 opens brightly with our poet. On the 10th of February, the bells of Stratford ring at the news of the marriage of his younger daughter, Judith, to Thomas Quiney. About this time, whether having a view to this marriage, or feeling some presentiments of approaching death, he draws out his last will, a copy of which is subjoined to this as to all former lives of Shakspeare. In this he has been thought to use his wife scandalously, "cutting her off not with a shilling, but with an old bed." But Knight has conclusively shown that she was otherwise and amply provided for, by the clear operation of the English law, having a life-interest of a third in her husband's houses, garden, and lands.

But now even the door of William Shakspeare must tremble at the knock of the postman of the Black River. The Myriadminded who "exhausted worlds, and then imagined new❞—who dealt with human life as a Creator, with the human heart as an angelic Witness-whose eye, if we dare use the expression, had run like a flame of fire through all the earth-Shakspeare must become a little lump of dust, as though a star were to be dissolved into a few dead ashes, the sport of every wind! And how died that mighty being? What was the mode of the "exit" of this Prince of Dramatists, and of men? It was, some think, in the character of Bardolph! A vicar of Stratford, writing forty-six years after, asserts that Shakspeare died of a fever contracted by a merry meeting held between him, Drayton, and Ben Jonson. Let us cling, however, to the hope that this story is one of the ten thousand floating lies told of celebrated men, and that with his heart, not overcharged with rioting and drunkenness, but in the full possession of his mighty faculties, and with all that humble reliance upon Christ,