as an immortal name, his life was suddenly closed. At the compara tively early age of fifty-two, while, with his own sweet Avon running gently near him, he may have contemplated years of quiet rest, on the 23rd of April, the anniversary of the day of his birth, he died! "So fails, so languishes, grows dim, and dies, All that this World is proud of. From their spheres Princes, and Emperors, and the crowns and palms And so the life of the poet of eternal nature passed away, but his crown and palm are destined to endure for ever! CHAPTER VI. SOME PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE. It has been remarked with truth that there is no species of composition, perhaps, so delightful, as that which presents us with personal characteristics, or personal anecdotes, of eminent men. And if its chief charm be in the gratification of our curiosity, it is a curiosity at least that has its origin in enthusiasm. We are anxious to know all that is possible to be learnt of those who have at any rate so honoured a place in our remembrance. "Intellectual discoveries, or heroic deeds, though they shed a broad and lasting lustre round the memory of those that have achieved them, yet occupy but a small part of the life of any individual; and we are not unwilling to penetrate the dazzling glory, and to see how the remaining intervals are filled up; to look into the minute details, to detect incidental foibles, and to be satisfied what qualities they have in common with ourselves, as well as distinct from us, entitled to our pity, or raised above our imitation." A few such anecdotes and characteristics I shall now select from among those Shakspeare has himself confessed to, and present to the reader. They will need little note or comment. Did our personal knowledge of him even end with these, we should be safe from the laborious satire of Malone, who has written a long life of Shakspeare to show us that we know nothing about him, and can know nothing, except that he was born and died. The two latter circumstances indeed would have been by no means clear to Mr. Malone, had he not fortunately got hold of the parish register of Stratford. Most unfortunately he got hold of the curious painted monument of the poet at the same time, and, with the assistance of the clerk or sexton, daubed it over with white paint! "Methinks I see them at their work, the sapient trouble tombs.' I wonder some voice did not arrest them "For Jesu's sake forbear!" in the words of the solemn and awful adjuration on the grave-stone beneath : "Blest be the man that spares these stones!" That " monumental bust," now so whitewashed and bedaubed, once represented the poet in his habit as he lived, and fully bore out the report of Aubrey, that he was a "handsome, well-shaped man." Thought and intellectual exertion, however, would seem before his death to have done the work of years upon him. When he was little past forty, he says to his friend, in evident allusion to himself— "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field*." -in another he speaks of his mistress "Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best." —in a third he tells us of his looking into his glass and finding himself "Bated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity." and in a subsequent allusion to his friend, he speaks with a touching selfreference 66 Against my love shall be, as I am now, With time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn; When hours have drain'd his blood, and fill'd his brow Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night §." We have no mention in all these, however, of any change in his auburn hair and beard, which were given so strikingly in the coloured bust. It is most probable indeed that they remained to the last-full, luxuriant, and unchanged-for Shakspeare hated wigs! scorning to "Make a summer of another's green, Robbing the old to dress his beauty new." On this point indeed he speaks more earnestly, and with a slight mixture of scorn,-in referring to former days, "Before these bastard signs of fair were born, Or durst inhabit on a living brow; Before the golden tresses of the dead, Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay || !"' And that Shakspeare was so sensible of the beauties of his person (in common with many eminent poets whom I cannot stop to name), as to seek to set them off to the utmost possible advantage, may be detected in the illustration of the following sonnet. The same feeling is observable, moreover, in the sensitiveness with which we have seen him view the effects of thought or time in planting his brow "with lines and wrinkles :". 66 Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, That the poet besides was not only costly, but tasteful in his dress, I think is intimated in another passage, when he gives us a good-humoured sneer at those who glory in their * Sonnet 2. "Garments, though new-fangled ill** " + Sonnet 138. Sonnet 62. § Sonnet 63. Sonnet 68. The same feeling is expressed more than once in his plays—in the "Merchant of Venice," and "Timon of Athens," for instance. Sonnet 146. **Sonnet 91. It would not be difficult perhaps to associate with another circumstance the feeling I have here illustrated. Shakspeare was lame. He was, like him who, of all since, has alone approached him in point of invention-dear and ever-honoured Sir Walter Scott-a "halting fellow." Upon these personal defects of poets, with reference to their action both upon the public and personal character, Mr. Moore has some excellent remarks in his life of Lord Byron which may be found applicable here. The lameness of Shakspeare is clearly made out, I think, by his sonnets, though perhaps less clearly in those where it is distinctly mentioned than in others where it is implied. These lines, for instance : "As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth,' may be taken simply (though I do not think them so), as a metaphorical allusion. He is more unequivocal where he subsequently exclaims, in the triumph of the heart over circumstances of disadvantage "So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised !" —though, in another passage, he again uses the word in a sense which might certainly be urged as merely metaphorical 66 Say that thou did'st forsake me for some fault, The slight uncertainty in which the question remains, however, is, to my mind, set at rest by the frequent allusions that are made in these confessions of the poet to his habit of riding on horseback. I will quote one passage, in which he tells us a somewhat startling anecdote of himself, which is relieved, however, at the close, by a beautiful and tender self-rebuke “The beast that bears me, tired with my woe, Plods dully on to bear that weight in me, As if by some instinct the wretch did know His rider loved not speed, being made from thee: The bloody spur cannot provoke him on, That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide, More sharp to me than spurring to his side.” Other passages might be quoted, as when he says 'O, what excuse will my poor beast then find, -but enough has been advanced to establish the fact I have mentioned as corroborative of the supposition of Shakspeare's infirmity. The seventy-seventh Sonnet presents to us a pleasing and characteristic anecdote. Shakspeare sends his young friend a blank table-book, with a few lines of excellent advice. The reader will be reminded of Lord Orrery's similar gift and verses to Swift on his birth-day : * Sonnet 37. † Sonnet 89. Sonnet 50. § Sonnet 51. "Look, what thy memory cannot contain Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find To take a new acquaintance of thy mind. Shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book." His friend, we learn, (from the hundred and twenty-second Sonnet), returned the gift in kind. It is delightful to be allowed to follow the poet thus into the private graces and courtesies of life. The following passage in the Confessions startled me not a little. Could Shakspeare have seen the vision of a future Rymer abusing the "tragedies of the last age," and spying out a commonplace want of originality in Hamlet and Othello? "If there be nothing new, but that, which is, Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, The second burthen of a former child !"& In a subsequent sonnet he shows how deeply he felt that the duty of a poet was to universalize, and not to 'Keep invention in a noted weed." Shakspeare occasionally alludes to his birth as humble Thy love is better than high birth to me."ş I shall close this mention of a few of the personal thoughts and characteristics of Shakspeare with two passages from his Confessions, of inimitable beauty. I should have placed the first in the preceding chapter, but that it illustrates a feeling, which, in its calm and sweet indulgence of sorrow, is far removed from melancholy. Who is there, among the gayest of the gay, that has not often experienced it? "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, The other, a compliment to his mistress, indicates most interestingly the chivalrous turn of Shakspeare's taste and reading "When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, Shakspeare was ever beautifully unenvious. He alludes more than once to one or two of his contemporaries, whom he calls "better spirits" than he he was passionately fond of Spenser; and passionately fond, too, of music, as is evident from the charming eighth sonnet, and many others. But I have closed my quotations for the present. He was not the less great because he admitted the greatness of others. It is better to rise above rivalry than to trample it down. CHAPTER VII. SHAKSPEARE's friend. The passages quoted in the last three chapters of these "Confessions," with one or two marked exceptions, are from Sonnets addressed to this nameless Immortal. They illustrate the view I have already taken of the peculiar circumstances under which the friendship was formed ("New Monthly Magazine," vol. xliii. p. 309)-of those individual sympathies for which it supplied an outlet, of that want of Shakspeare's heart it was destined to supply. It would be easy to show, further, that there was scarcely any of his emotions that were not poured forth to this youth; emotions the intensest and most profound-acute sometimes even to selfishness, but expressed at all times with unequalled tenderness, modesty, purity, and love. Here, as I have said, was the pillow his spirit reposed on: here too was the object to which he clung, as connecting him in actual life with the moral beauty and sweetness of the world. To his friend he might speak, in the words of a contemporary poet in a case not quite dissimilar— "To you I have unclasp'd my burden'd soul, Emptied the store-house of my thoughts and heart, Little remains for me now to add, except to notice some circumstances of a singular character that occurred in the course of this friendship. The silly imputations to which some of its expressions have given rise were disproved in a former paper. They recoil on the suggestors. Such expressions have become unfamiliar now, as such friendships, I fear, are less frequent, but they distinguished all the romantic intercourse of the time, and of that which succeeded. So spoke young Milton to his Deodati, Cowley to his Hervey, Suckling to his Carew, Davenant to his Endymion Porter and Henry Jermyn. The personal love of Shakspeare for the youth was indeed increased and exalted by the peculiar circumstances of their connexion, and partook of something which, in the very depth and subtlety of its refinement, the most romantic of other friendships have wanted. A sense of personal beauty was unquestionably mixed up with it, but it is the feeling in its highest abstraction, and, in the very depth of its purity, voluptuously refined. It acted, indeed, simply as the conductor to his imagination And the friendship with which it was connected did a similar service to his heart, in giving satisfaction to those individual yearnings and sympathies which, with all his power above the earth, kept him bound a prisoner upon it, and which, in all the intellectual triumphs to which they served to contribute, had found no outlet for themselves. It is a sovereign law of the imagination, "That if it would but apprehend some joy, |