charge his assessment, although he was the undoubted possessor of property within the borough; that he proclaimed his poverty in the most abject manner, and proclaimed it untruly whilst he held any property at all, and his lands were mortgaged for a very inadequate sum, when the first object of an embarrassed man would have been to have upheld his credit by making an effort to meet every public demand? What is the most extraordinary thing of all is, that he should have recovered this long humiliation so suddenly that, in 1596, he goes to the College of Arms for additions to his armorial bearings, and states that he is worth five hundred pounds in lands and tenements. During this period he was unquestionably a resident in the parish of Stratford; for the register of that parish contains the entry of the burial of a daughter in 1579, and the baptism of a son in 1580. His grandchildren, also, are baptized in that parish in 1583 and 1585. But his assessments in "that place "-the borough-are reduced in 1578, and wholly foregone in 1579. He has ceased to be amenable to the borough assessments. The lands of Welcombe and Bishopton, we may fairly assume, were his home. He has not been dependent upon the trade of Stratford, whether in gloves or wool. He is a culti vator, and his profits are not very variable. His son purchases a large quantity of land in the same district a few years afterwards; and that son himself becomes a cultivator, even whilst he is the most successful dramatist of his time. That son has also his actions in the bailiff's court, as his father had, for corn sold and delivered, of which more hereafter. That son cleaves

to his native place with love which no fame won, no pleasure enjoyed, in the great capital,-the society of the great, the praises of the learned,- -can extinguish. Neither does that son take any part in the affairs of the borough. He purchases the best house in Stratford in 1597, but the records of Stratford show that he had no desire for local honours. The father, instead of sinking into poverty, appears to us to have separated himself from the concerns of the borough, and from the society of the honest men who administered them. He probably had not more happiness in his struggle to maintain the rank of gentleman; but that he did make that struggle is, we think, consistent with all the circumstances upon record. That the children of William Shakspere should have been brought up at Stratford,— that Stratford should have been his home, although London was his place of necessary sojourn,-is, we think, quite incompatible with the belief that, at the exact period when the poet was gaining rapid wealth as a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre, the father was so reduced to the extremity of indigence that he had nothing to distrain upon in his dwelling in the place where he had dwelt for years, in competence and honour.

Seeing, then, that at any rate in the year 1574, when John Shakspere purchased two freehold houses in Stratford, it was scarcely necessary for him to withdraw his son William from school, as Rowe has it, on account. of the narrowness of his circumstances (the education at that school costing the father nothing), it is not difficult to believe that the son remained there till the SUP. VOL.

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period when boys were usually withdrawn from grammar-schools. In those days the education of the university commenced much earlier than at present. Boys intended for the learned professions, and more especially for the church, commonly went to Oxford and Cambridge at eleven or twelve years of age. If they were not intended for those professions, they probably remained at the grammar-school till they were thirteen or fourteen; and then they were fitted for being ar prenticed to tradesmen, or articled to attorneys, a numerous and thriving body in those days of cheap litigation. Many also went early to the Inns of Court, which were the universities of the law, and where there was real study and discipline in direct connection with the several Societies. To assume that William Shakspere did not stay long enough at the grammar-school of Stratford to obtain a very fair "proficiency in Latin," with some knowledge of Greek, is to assume an absurdity upon the face of the circumstances; and it could never have been assumed at all, had not Rowe, setting out upon a false theory, that, because in the works of Shakspere "we scarce find any traces of anything that looks like an imitation of the ancients," held that therefore "his not copying at least something from them may be an argument of his never having read them." Opposed to this is the statement of Aubrey, much nearer to the times of Shakspere: "he understood Latin pretty well." Rowe had been led into his illogical inference by the "small Latin and less Greek" of Jonson; the "old mother-wit" of Denham; the "his learning was very little" of Fuller; the "native wood

notes wild" of Milton,-phrases, every one of which is to be taken with considerable qualification, whether we regard the peculiar characters of the utterers, or the circumstances connected with the words themselves. The question rests not upon the interpretation of the dictum of this authority or that, but upon the indisputable fact that the very earliest writings of Shakspere are imbued with a spirit of classical antiquity, and that the allusive nature of the learning that manifests itself in them, whilst it offers the best proof of his familiarity with the ancient writers, is a circumstance which has misled those who never attempted to dispute the existence of the learning which was displayed in the direct pedantry of his contemporaries. "If," said Hales of Eton, "he had not read the classics, he had likewise not stolen from them." Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and all the early dramatists, overload their plays with quotation and mythological allusion. According to Hales, they steal, and therefore they have read. He who uses his knowledge skilfully is assumed not to have read.

It is not our intention here to enter upon a general examination of the various opinions that have been held as to the learning of Shakspere, and the tendency of those opinions to show that he was without learning. We only desire to point out, by a very few observations, that the learning manifested in his early productions does not bear out the assertion of Rowe that his proficiency in the Latin language was interrupted by his early removal from the free-school of Stratford. His youthful poem, 'Venus and Adonis,' the first heir of his invention, is upon a classical subject. The Rape of

Lucrece' is founded upon a legend of the beginnings of Roman history. Would he have ventured upon these subjects had he been unfamiliar with the ancient writers, from the attentive study of which he could alone obtain the knowledge which would enable him to treat them with propriety? His was an age of sound scholarship. He dedicates both poems to a scholar, and a patron of scholars. Does any one of his contemporaries object that these classical subjects were treated by a young man ignorant of the classics? Will the most critical examination of these poems detect anything that betrays this ignorance? Is there not the most perfect keeping in both these poems,—an original conception of the mode of treating these subjects, advisedly adopted, with the full knowledge of what might be imitated, but preferring the vigorous painting of nature to any imitation? 'Love's Labour's Lost,' undoubtedly one of the earliest comedies, shows-upon the principle laid down by Coleridge, that " a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits "that the habits of William Shakspere "had been scholastic, and those of a student." The Comedy of Errors' is full of those imitations of the ancients in particular passages which critics have in all cases been too apt to take as the chief evidences of learning. The critics of Shakspere are puzzled by these imitations; and when they see with what skill he adopts, or amends, or rejects, the incidents of the 'Menæchmi' of Plautus, they have no resource but to contend that his knowledge of Plautus was derived from a wretched translation, published in all probability eight or ten years