was contamination in the subject, and that the following brief memorandum, which Mr. Collier brought forward as the paper to which Malone referred, is also spurious.

"Inhabitantes of Sowtherk as have complaned [o]f Jully, 1596.

this

Mr. Markis

Mr. Tuppin

Mr. Langorth

Wilson the pyper

Mr. Barett

Mr. Shaksper

Phellipes

Tomson

Mother Golden the baude

Nagges

Fillpott and no more and soe well ended."

It may be that this is a delusion, deliberately contrived. If it be, the rogue has baited his trap so well that he shall have me a willing prey. I cannot easily believe that such a genuine-seeming glimpse of real life is artificial; and I am loath to lose those neighbors of William Shakespeare upon whom his calm and searching glances fell, and who watched with curiosity the handsome player-poet as he went in and out on his way to and from the Black-friars. I sympathize too heartily with the writer as he shuts his ears against Wilson the piper, who had the real Lincolnshire drone, I have Falstaff's word for it,and as he tosses off Fillpot with such a round Amen

of thankfulness. I mourn the vanishing Nagges, whom I think of as a humble kind of Silence, or perhaps Goodman Verges, and feel injured at the assertion that Mother Golden-Mrs. Quickly in the flesh, and plenty of it-is a myth; than which nothing could be more deplorable, except, indeed, that she were virtuous.

The last five years of the sixteenth century are among the most interesting and important in the history of Shakespeare's life. He was then rapidly attaining the independent position which he coveted, and for which he labored; while growth, culture, and experience were uniting in the development of those transcendent powers which reached their grand perfection in the next decade. To those years may be confidently assigned the production of Romeo and Juliet in its second and final form, King John, the two Parts of King Henry the Fourth, the first sketch of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, King Henry the Fifth, As You Like It, and Hamlet. They were probably produced in this order, the first in 1596, the last in 1600. The man who could put those plays upon the stage at a time when play-going was the favorite amusement of all the better and brighter part of the London public, gentle and simple, was sure to grow rich, if he were but prudent; and Shakespeare was prudent, and even thrifty. He knew the full worth of money. He felt the truth

told in the simile of Franklin (in the large grasp of his worldly wisdom the Bacon of democracy), that it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. And he saw that pecuniary independence is absolutely necessary to him who is seeking, as he sought, a social position higher than that to which he was born. Therefore he looked after his material interests much more carefully than after his literary reputation. The whole tenor of his life shows that he labored as a playwright solely that he might obtain the means of going back to Stratford to live the life of an independent gentleman. His income now began to be considerable; and there are yet remaining records of the care with which he invested his money, and his willingness to take legal measures to protect himself against small losses. It is not pleasant to think of the author of The Merchant of Venice going to law to compel the payment of a few pounds sterling: it would be revolting, if the debtor's failure were because of poverty. But as we have to face the fact, we may find comfort in the certainty that a man of that sweetness of disposition which is attributed to him by his contemporaries, could not have been litigious, and in the probability that he knew too much of human nature and of the law to commence a suit, unless to protect himself against fraud, or to decide a legal liability. He who so pitilessly painted Shylock could not but have felt the truth of the maxim, Summum jus, summa injuria.

Filial piety, unhappily, is not always a sign of generosity of soul; for hard masters, cruel creditors, and selfish friends are sometimes devoted sons; but it is pleasant, in remarking upon Shakespeare's thrift, to record that one of the earliest uses of his prosperity seems to have been the relief of his father from the consequences of misfortune. The little estate of Ashbies, part of Mary Arden's inheritance, which had been mortgaged to Edmund Lambert in 1578, should have been released by the conditions of the mortgage on the repayment of the mortgage-money on or before the 29th of September, 1580. The mortgagors tendered the money, forty pounds ; but they owed Lambert more, upon another obligation; and he, having possession, and knowing John Shakespeare's inability to incur law expenses, refused to release Ashbies unless the other debt, for which it was not given as security, was discharged also. But in 1597, John Shakespeare and his wife ventured upon that most trying and expensive of all legal proceedings, a chancery suit, to compel John Lambert, the son and heir of Edmund, to restore the estate. There can be no reasonable doubt that the money necessary to this proceeding, and the prompting to undertake it, came from William Shakespeare, incited by filial love and attachment to ancestral fields.

Previously to this date, - how long we do not know, but it was certainly some months before

October, 1596,- John Shakespeare applied to the Heralds' College (and, if we are to believe the records, not for the first time) for a grant of coat-armor, by which he, then a yeoman, might attain the recognized position of a gentleman. Such applications were then customarily made by men who deemed themselves of sufficient importance to enter the pale of gentry. The arms, if granted, were of value; for they were an official and universally recognized certificate of a certain social standing, which those to whom they were granted were required to show that they were in condition creditably to support. It has been conjectured that John Shakespeare made this application at the instigation and with the means— for the honor cost money—of his now prosperous But in the circumstances of the case, and in certain evidence which William Shakespeare himself unconsciously left upon the subject, there seems to be ground for more than a guess that he was the real mover in this matter.

son.

To John Shakespeare, a man now past middle life, and without property or position, this empty honor would have brought only such distinction as a man having the good sense of which his career was evidence must have seen was most unenviable. But sustained by the money and the influence of his son, prosperous and in favor with powerful members of the nobility, he could bear up against ridicule. And as far as the son him

H