"The thrice three Muses mourning for the death In the end of 1593, the theatres were re-opened, and Shakspeare was summoned from the country to resume his labours. In the midst of these he published his "Rape of Lucrece," and dedicated it, as he had done the "Venus and Adonis," to Lord Southampton, between whom and the poet acquaintance had rapidly ripened into intimate friendship. This young lord seems to have been fond of attending the theatres, and had there met with Shakspeare. He appreciated his genius, and became his munificent patron, on one occasion, it is said, giving him a thousand pounds to enable him to complete a purchase. Whether this sum was or was not given by the patron, it does not seem to have been absolutely required by the poet. His property in the theatre had been steadily growing in value. We have seen him, in 1589, a proprietor in Blackfriars' theatre. Ere four years had passed, the company was so prosperous that another theatre, the Globe, required to be built; and in a year or two afterwards, they repaired and extended the original building. Hence our poet was enabled, in 1597, to purchase a tenement in Stratford, called the "New Place" the best house at the time in his native town, and which he probably bought with the view of an early retreat from his profession. The next year we find one Richard Quiney seeking to borrow from him thirty pounds—a sure evidence that he was known to be in good circumstances. Altogether, next to Shakspeare's genius, his care and caution. in the management of his temporal affairs strike us as most. remarkable; and had other literary men, along with a twentieth part of his genius, possessed a tithe of his prudence, the half of Disraeli's "Calamities of Authors," and the whole of Emerson's essay on "Prudence" would have remained unwritten. Parsimonious, miserly, speculative in moneymatters, we cannot conceive Shakspeare to have been; but he hated a debt as he hated a dulness, he feared a dungeon as he feared a condemned play, and was actuated-with a far happier result-by the same noble spirit which made Burns indite the stanza d "Not for to hide it in a hedge, What poor creatures a Steele, a Savage, a Macginn, or an Edgar Poe-skulking before their creditors, trembling at every postman's knock, and throwing piles of unopened letters into the fire-seem, compared to the greatest of their tribe-the truly "wise" as well as "gentle" and superlatively gifted "Willy!" Many literary men indeed have, owing to uncontrollable circumstances and misfortunes, been plunged into pecuniary embarrassments at which their honourable pride has revolted; but perhaps the majority have been chiefly to blame themselves. Shakspeare, like all poets, loved his birthplace, but, unlike many poets, he enjoyed frequent opportunities of visiting it. Dante lived latterly and died far from Florence. Byron lived for eight years and died far from England, and from the date of boyhood never saw again the beautiful granite streets of Aberdeen or the blue hills of Braemar. Shelley died in the arms of the Italian sea, not in his native Sussex or in his adopted Marlowe. Coleridge expired in Hampstead, and had not for a long period been near that "Dear native brook, wild streamlet of the west," which he had apostrophised so tenderly. Burns, although he sung "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly like the west, For there the bonnie lassie lives, for years ere his departure had not seen a leaf of the woods, or heard one murmur of the streams of Coila. But Shakspeare, it is said, visited his birthplace once a-year; the distance was indeed only ninety-three miles from London, but that, in those days, was equivalent to thrice the number now. He was there certainly at the burial of his only son, Hamnet, a child of eleven years, in 1596. He was there in 1607, when his eldest daughter, Susanna, a girl witty above her sex, a true Shakspeare, was married to John Hall, a physician— was there for the last years of his life-and there he died. His imagination and affections seem never to have strayed from Stratford; and even while in London, he constantly saw "A river flow down the vale of Cheapside" it was the Avon; and woods clustering up the declivity of Ludgate Hill- they were the dear old woods of Charl cote. Queen Elizabeth had shown him many marks of favour, and had, according to the traditional story, encouraged him to write the "Merry Wives," and to show Falstaff in love. James I., on his accession to the throne, continued the patronage, and granted to Shakspeare and his fellow-shareholders a special licence to prosecute their trade in all parts of the kingdom. Shakspeare seems to have frequently acted before James, and his plays were special favourites. In 1597 he had commenced the separate publication of his plays, and continued this practice till 1600, publishing in this way"Richard II.," "Richard III.," "Love's Labour's Lost," "Henry IV.," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Merchant of Venice,' ," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Much Ado About Nothing," but with the last the series stopped for the time. In 1601 he lost his father. In the same year it is supposed that, with a company of players, he visited Scotland-went as far north as Aberdeen, and collected materials for "Macbeth." The evidence for this is not very strong, but we are very much inclined to believe it, and fondly dream that he drew the "blasted heath," the "castle with its pleasant seat," and the "martlet's loved mansionry " from actual realities. It is intolerable to suppose that the greatest of poets never saw a real mountain, and yet there is no evidence that, unless in this journey to Scotland, he ever did. In 1602, he gave £320 for one hundred and seven acres of land, which he attached to his property in the New Place; and in 1605 he purchased a moiety of the great and small tithes of Stratford for the sum of £440. He had been even 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. Το 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. 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 |