much was it misinterpreted. Cervantes died in the same year and the same month with Shakspeare. Two documents specify the wealth of these authors.

William Shakspeare, by his last testament, bequeathed to his wife his second best bed. He left two of his brother actors thirty-two shillings each, to buy rings. He constituted his eldest daughter, Susan, his residuary legatee, and made some little presents to his second, Judith, who signed a cross at the bottom of the papers, proving that she could not write.

Michael Cervantes acknowledged, by note, that he had received, as the dower of his wife, Catherine Salazor y Palacios, a spindle, an iron skillet, three spits, a shovel, a rasp, a brush, six bushels of meal, five pounds of wax, two little stools, a four-legged table, a woollen mattress, a copper candlestick, two quilts, two infant Jesuses, with their little clothes and shirts, forty-four hens and pullets, with one

cock!

There is, now-a-days, no scribbler so mean but would exclaim against the injustice of mankind and their contempt of genius, if he were not gorged with pensions, a hundredth part of which would have been a fortune to Cervantes and to Shakspeare. In 1616, therefore, the

painter of Lear's fool, and the painter of Don Quixotte, worthy fellow-travellers! set out together for a better world.

Corneille had come to supply their place in the cosmopolite family of great minds, whose children are born among all nations; as in Rome, Brutus was succeeded by Brutuses, and Scipio by Scipios.

The bard of the Cid, a boy of six years, beheld the last days of the bard of Othello; as Michael Angelo delivered up his palette, his chisel, his square, and his lute, to death, in the same year when Shakspeare, with the buskin on his feet, and the mask in his hand, entered on life; as the dying poet of Lusitania hailed the first suns of the bard of Albion. While the young butcher of Stratford, armed with his knife, apostrophized before he slaughtered his victim sheep and heifers, Camoens made the tomb of Inez, on the banks of Tagus, echo with his swan-like melody.

"For how many years may I yet celebrate ye, oh! nymphs of the Tagus? Fortune draws me on to wander through sorrows and perils; sometimes o'er the sea, sometimes in the midst of combats, sometimes degraded by shameful indigence, with no asylum but a hospital. It

sufficeth not that I was devoted to so many woes; it seems that grief must come even from those I sing. Poets, you can bestow glory; behold its price! My years decline; soon will my summer and mine autumn pass away. Misfortune leads to the brink of dark repose, and of eternal sleep."

And must the greatest geniuses, in all ages, and of all countries, have to repeat those last words of Camoens ?

Milton, aged but eight years when Shakspeare died, rose, like a shade, beside that great man's tomb. Milton also complains of having fallen on evil days, and too late an age.

Unless an age too late, or cold

Climate, or years damp, my intended wing
Depress'd.

He felt this apprehension even at the moment when he was composing the ninth book of Paradise Lost, which includes the seduction of Eve, with the most pathetic scenes between her and Adam.

These divine spirits, predecessors or contemporaries of Shakspeare, have in their natures something which partakes of the beauty of their countries. Dante was an illustrious citizen and

valiant warrior. Tasso would have been well placed in the brilliant band who followed Renaud. Lope and Calderon bore arms. Ercilla was at once the Homer and the Achilles of his day. Cervantes and Camoens showed the glorious scars of courage and misfortune. The style of these soldier-poets has often the same elevation which marked their careers. To Shakspeare's lot fell a widely different one. He is impassioned in his works, but rarely noble; dignity is sometimes wanting in his style, as it was in his life.

VOL. I.

X

THE LIFE OF SHAKSPEARE.

AND what was that life? How much is known of it? Very little! He to whom it belonged concealed it, and cared but little either for his works or his days. If we study the private sentiments of Shakspeare in his pages, the painter of so many dark pictures would appear to have been a wayward man, referring every thing to his own existence; it is true that he found abundant occupation in so vast an inward life. The poet's father, probably a Catholic, once a justice of peace, and alderman of Stratford, became a woolstapler and a butcher. William, the eldest of ten children, worked at his father's trade. I have already said that he who held the dagger of Melpomene bled calves before he killed tyrants, and addressed pathetic harangues to the spectators of the unjust death dealt to these innocent beasts. Shakspeare, in his youth, attacked beneath an apple-tree, which still re