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of our social circle. Society is not purely an affair of intellect, or even of moral worth.

It was, then, for this social consideration that William Shakespeare labored and schemed; that he, the Stratford fugitive, might return to his native place and meet Sir Thomas Lucy as a prosperous gentleman. But Sir Thomas, I think, with that scorn of new men which, it may well be feared, is very general, even in republics, endeavored to check one of his aspirations, this one for coat-armor. The arms were granted, but not until three years after they had been applied for, and in fact not until that time after a grant of them had been drafted. A draft dated October 20th, 1596, of a grant to John Shakespeare of the right to bear a golden silver-headed spear upon a black band in a golden shield, with a white falcon grasping a golden spear for a crest, still exists in the College of Arms; and from this the grant actually issued in 1599 differs only by the addition of the right to bear the Arden arms impaled; impaling, or bearing a second coat upon the left half of the shield being the heraldic mode of recording marriage with an heiress of the family whose coat is thus displayed. And these documents, both sketch and grant, also tell the story of the application for the arms. For they were made, as they record, upon the ground that "John Shakespere, nowe of Stratford upon Avon in the counte of Warwik gent., whose parent, great grand

father, and late antecessor, for his faithefull and approved service to the late most prudent prince King H. 7. of famous memorie, was advaunced and rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him in those parts of Warwikeshere," was, like his ancestors of some descents, in good reputation and credit, and also that he had married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wilmecote. Now, John Shakespeare's great-grandfather had not been thus distinguished and rewarded by Henry VII.; but his wife's, and therefore his son's, ancestor had; and of those bedchamber honors that son was evidently not forgetful, and determined to obtain the fullest advantage. If there be littleness in this, it was the age that was in fault, and not the man who conformed to prejudices which, as we have seen, he really scorned, but was not strong enough to override.

The delay of three years in the granting of these arms must have been caused by some opposition to the grant; the motto given with them, Non sans droict, (Not without right,) itself seems to assert a claim against a denial; and who so likely to make this opposition as the great neighbor of the Shakespeares, the Parliament member and justice of peace, Sir Thomas Lucy? There is record of censure after they were granted. The herald principally concerned in conferring them, Sir William Dethick, Garter King at Arms, was called to account for having granted arms improperly, and the

grant to John Shakespeare was among the causes of complaint. His justification rested, in a great measure at least, upon the allegation upon the margin of the draft of 1596, that John Shakespeare "sheweth a patent thereof under Clarence Cook's hands in paper xx years past"; and in the grant of 1599 it is expressly stated that John Shakespeare had "produced this his auncient cote of arms heretofore assigned him whilst he was her Majesties officer and baylefe" of Stratford. Because no record of this grant is known to exist, it has been hitherto supposed that no such grant was made. But it is not at all improbable that John Shakespeare, when he was bailiff and in the height of his prosperity, made application to the heralds for arms at the time of one of their visitations, and that the matter went as far, at least, as the draft of a grant and a sketch, or, as it was called, a trick, of the arms, and that, the matter being spoken of in the neighborhood, the final grant was stopped at the instance of an old county family like the Lucys, who were particular about what Mrs. Page of Windsor would have called the article of their gentry. For in the famous first scene of the comedy in which she appears, where the bearer of the coat with the luces is ridiculed, his particularity about the antiquity of that coat is made even more of than his anger at the stealing of his deer. He is Robert Shallow, Esquire, Justice of Peace and coram, and cust-alorum, and ratalorum too; and a

gentleman born, who writes himself armigero in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation; and he has done it any time these three hundred years; all his successors that have gone before him, and all his ancestors that come after him may give the dozen white luces in their coat. For, mind you, it is an old coat; and although this ignorant, lowbred Welsh parson will mistake a luce for the familiar beast to man, and have it passant, you are to know that the luce is the fresh fish, and that the salt fish is an old coat, and that the upstart bailiffs in yonder dirty little town are not to be bearing silver-headed tilting-spears upon golden shields, and getting within the pale of gentry by marrying poor gentlemen's daughters, and by heraldic puns upon their names, when their betters, by punning on their names can only bear fresh fish, which are subject to unpleasant misapprehension and mispronunciation, and have to be salted to keep and attain the honors of antiquity. If Shakespeare had two causes of quarrel with the man of the luces, he settled the two accounts rarely in that short scene of his only comedy of English manners; which he wrote in 1598, between the date at which the confirmation of his father's arms was drafted and that at which it was granted.

IV.

Shakespeare was now able to take an important step toward establishing himself handsomely in his native place. In 1597 he bought of William Underhill the Great House, or New Place, as it was called in Stratford, a mansion built of brick and timber, about a hundred and fifty years before, by Sir Hugh Clopton, the benefactor of the town. It cost Shakespeare sixty pounds sterling (equal to about $1500); a small outlay for the dwelling of a man of its new possessor's means and capacity of enjoyment. We know from the fine levied at the sale, that the premises included the Great House itself, two barns, two gardens, and two orchards. But from contemporary legal documents we learn that in 1550 the house was so much in need of repair as to be almost in decay. This was doubtless the reason why it was sold for so small a price. Its owner in the early part of the last century, Sir Hugh Clopton, a lineal descendant of its builder, told Theobald that Shakespeare "repaired and modelled it to his own mind"; and this family tradition is supported by the record of the payment in 1598 of "x d” to Mr. Shakespeare for "a lod of ston," which was probably at the thrifty poet's disposal on account of the extensive alterations at New Place. No representation of the house as it was in Shakespeare's time is known to exist, it having been

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