Humbly complaining to your Highness.-RICHARD III.

Beginning of a bill in Chancery.

Are those precepts served? says Sharo to Davy, in King Henry IV.

Tell me what state, what dignity, what honor,

Can'st thou demise to any child of mine?-RICHARD III.

Demise is a term used in leases; and it is said that no poet but Shakspeare ever used the word in that

sense.

Now it does not appear to me that all these instances present any stronger indication of the legal acquirements of Shakspeare, than can be shown from his works, in respect to all the arts and sciences to which he refers.

Upon this principle of reasoning I could prove that he was a judge, a soldier, a shoemaker, a watchman, an ostler, a justice of the peace, a heráld, a legate, a king, in short, every thing.

All these instances prove no more than this—that he made himself thoroughly acquainted with every subject upon which he wrote; and in matters of history, except in some few instances wherein, for special purposes, he departed from what may be considered authentic, he was entirely to be relied upon. Perhaps one of the most remarkable features in the

writings of Shakspeare is, that, with the exception of his plot, which, so far as regards his historical plays, he generally obtained from Hollingshead, he borrowed from no one.

But what is still more remarkable, he never borrowed from himself. No man who has carefully examined Shakspeare, and who understands his spirit and style, can entertain any doubt as to his identity. There is a sort of general character that pervades every thing he wrote, that prevents its being misunderstood for the production of any other man. And that character is rather in the thought-the peculiarity of the thought, than the language; although it somewhat partakes of both. He seems to have had no partiality apparent in any part of his thirty six plays-for any particular expression -no pet phrases. Indeed he seems to have lost in creating one character all recollection of what he had previously done; and in short to have lost himself in the representation of others. It could be readily shown that in this he differs from almost all the great writers of antiquity, and also from those of modern date. Even Scott, the most fruitful among them all, and with whom a comparison may be more aptly instituted, can readily be detected, and indeed was so even in his fancied concealment,

by a certain peculiarity of expression, and a partiality to certain quaint terms which appear in every one of his volumes. We are not permitted to enter into a minute examination of this subject; it is rather incidental than necessary to our purpose, and it must so forcibly have struck others that it has nothing of novelty to recommend it. And I leave it therefore with these remarks.

The only book to which I can trace any thing like a similarity, is the Bible.

In Shylock, Merchant of Venice, in the scene between Portia and the Prince of Morocco, will be found this passage:

"Dislike me not for my complexion;

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,
To whom I am a neighbor, and near bred."

And in the Song of Solomon, 1st chapter and 6th verse, these words are to be found:

"Look not upon me because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me."

In 1582, when but eighteen years of age, he married Ann Hathaway who was eight years older than himself. By this marriage he had three children, Susan, Judith, and a son whom he called Hamlet. I should suppose this was not a happy marriage, not

merely from the long absence of Shakspeare, but from his will, by which he left his wife only his "second best bed," as well as from the sentiments so perfectly consonant with nature expressed in his Play of The Twelfth Night.

Let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.
For howsoever we do praise ourselves
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,
Than women's are.

Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed doth fall that very hour.
Twelfth Night, Act 2d, Scene 4th.

After his marriage, falling into dissolute associations, he was detected in poaching, in one of his frolics, upon the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy. This appears to have been the result of imprudence simply, but inasmuch as he was treated with some severity by Sir Thomas, he in return lampooned him in a very severe pasquinade, which "is not fit for ears polite." His biographers seem to confirm the story by suggesting that the description in “As you like it," of the deer; and the reflections of the melancholy Jacques, arose from this circumstance.

Duke. Come shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me, the poor dapple fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines, with forked heads,
Have their round haunches gored.

Lord. Indeed, my Lord,

you.

The melancholy Jacques grieves at that;
And, in that kind, swears you do more usurp
Than doth your brother that hath banished
To day my Lord of Amiens, and myself,
Did steal behind him, as he lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook, that brawls along the wood,
To the which place, a poor sequestered stag,
That from the hunters aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish. And indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting.

Subsequently oppressed with poverty, and anticipating a prosecution for the libel, in the year 1586, he left Stratford for London, being then twentytwo years old, a beggar in purse, but rich in talent, beyond all the sons of men. Had not poverty and prosecution united in driving him from his humble occupation in Warwickshire, how many matchless lessons of wisdom and morality, how many unparalleled displays of wit and imagination, of pathos and sublimity, had been buried in oblivion. Pictures of emotion, of character, of passion, more profound than mere philosophy had ever conceived,