one, for fear of the curse above said, dare touch his gravestone." It has had one good effect, at least. It has kept at Stratford those relics which but therefor would probably have been removed to Westminster Abbey.

Shakespeare's wife and his two daughtersSusannah, married to Dr. Hall, and Judith, married to Thomas Quiney - survived him. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, who also was living at the time of his death, was twice married; first, to Thomas Nash, an esquire, of Stratford, and afterward to Mr. John Barnard of Abington in Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II. in 1661; but she had no children. Judith had three sons, who died unmarried; and with Lady Barnard, who died in 1669-70, Shakespeare's family became extinct. His property was strictly entailed upon the male issue of his daughter Susannah, which failed to appear. The entail was broken by legal contrivance; and soon after the death of Lady Barnard, the estate which he had gathered with so much labor and solicitude was dispersed. New Place, which was the home of his later years, was distinguished, in Lady Barnard's time, by the brief residence there of Queen Henrietta Maria, during the troubles of the Great Revolution. Mr. and Mrs. Nash entertained the Queen there for three weeks, in June, 1643, when, escorted by Prince Rupert and his troops, she was on her progress to join King Charles at Oxford,

an incident which would have been well-pleasing to Mistress Nash's grandfather. Afterward, as we have already seen, New Place fell into the hands of Sir Hugh Clopton, a descendant of its builder, who renovated and altered it; and it was finally bought by the Reverend Francis Gastrell as his residence. He lived there several years, much annoyed by curious pilgrims to his house and to his garden, in which there was a mulberry-tree, which, according to the tradition of the town, Shakespeare planted with his own hands. This reverend gentleman was wealthy enough to indulge in that very expensive luxury, a high temper. So at last he gave his vexation vent by cutting down the mulberry-tree,* and afterward, in 1759, having quarrelled with the magistrates about assessments, he razed his house to the ground, and left the place, a petty ecclesiastic Erostratus, hooted and execrated by the Stratford people. Thus, within less than one hundred and fifty years of his death, all traces of Shakespeare had disappeared from his native village, except his birthplace and his tomb.

This is all that we know by authentic record, by tradition, and by inference, of him who stands

* The wood of this tree was bought by a watchmaker of Stratford, who made it into boxes and similar articles. It must have attained an enormous size; for there is enough of it extant to make a line-of-battle ship. But my piece and yours, reader, are genuine.

But

alone in the highest niche of literary fame. this is much. It seems little only because of his greatness. Of many men not to be thought of in comparison with him we know indeed much more; and in these days, when every man seems, like Pepys, to be his own Boswell, we are likely to know all; but of many who occupy a place only second to his, we know much less. The causes of our ignorance of Shakespeare's life are partly the Puritanism which developed itself in the mother country during his life, and the consequent political convulsions which came so soon after his death, and lasted so long; partly the frivolous and grovelling taste of the literary and dramatic school which came in with the Restoration, and prevailed for more than half a century, and which cared little about the works and less about the life of William Shakespeare; partly, too, we may be sure, a desire on his part, characteristic of all cultivated people of English race, to keep personal affairs from publicity. But the total effect of these causes is small in comparison with the results of the indifference which prevailed among people of all ages and countries, until within the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, to the personal character and private lives of poets, painters, scientific men, and generally of all public persons not concerned in government. When men have control over the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens in peace, and are able to plunge

two nations into war, the world follows their movements with prying, wondering eyes; but heretofore when they only amused, or even instructed, they must have achieved fame, and a generation or two must have passed away before the world at large concerned itself about their personal histories. We know more of the lives of brutal, selfish soldiers, and of crafty, selfish churchmen, who had no thought or purpose beyond the attainment or the preservation of power and place for themselves and their adherents, than we do of men whose quiet, thoughtful labors have blessed and delighted millions from generation to generation. Of Shakespeare we know more than the Greeks knew of Æschylus, the father of their tragedy, or of Aristophanes, the father of their comedy, two centuries after they died. Public functions partially preserved the personal history of Sophocles from similar obscurity. Of Molière, the greatest and most original of French dramatic writers, we have very meagre personal accounts; and it is remarkable that not a page of his manuscripts is known to be in existence. The personal history of Shakespeare's great contemporary, Bacon, is well known; but had he not become successively the King's Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England, Master Bacon might have written his Essays and worked out his Novum Organon in happy, unobserved obscurity, and

the world might have begun to inquire into his every-day life only after it had discovered that he was the greatest philosopher and the worldlywisest man of modern times. We are yet more ignorant of Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen than we are of him. Of Beaumont and Fletcher, both born in the rank of gentry, one the son of a Judge, the other of a Bishop, we know little more than that they wrote their plays and lived in the society of the most intelligent men of their day. Chapman's associations and what he did are discovered only by indirect collateral evidence; but eminent as he was, and highly esteemed as he appears to have been, nothing is recorded of his personal history. We are obliged to infer the year of his birth from the record of his age upon his portrait; and time has left us no guide-post to his birthplace. The minor stars of the Elizabethan galaxy, the Greenes, Peeles, Marlowes, Websters, Fords, and such like, left hardly a trace behind them which their own pens had not written. Ben Jonson, who lived to see all the poets of the Elizabethan period in their graves, and to be an object of literary and almost antiquarian interest to a new generation and a new school, left more materials for his memoirs than any contemporary poet. But it is only with his later years that we are thus acquainted. Of his youth and early manhood we are not less ignorant than we are of Shakespeare's.