one year. He continued to prosper, and in 1570 he took under his cultivation yet other lands, a farm called Ington, at the then goodly rent of £8. The year 1571 saw him chief alderman; and in 1575 he bought two freehold houses in Henley Street, with gardens and orchards. William Shakespeare, therefore, at ten years of age, was the son of one of the most substantial and respected men of Stratford, who was one of its fourteen burgesses, and who had rapidly attained, step by step, the highest honors in the gift of his townsmen. He was styled Master Shakespeare,

a designation the manly style of which we have belittled into Mister, voiding it at the same time of its honorable significance. As high bailiff and chief alderman he sat as justice of the peace, and thus even became "worshipful." There has been much dispute as to what was his occupation at this time; his glover's trade having been before abandoned. Rowe, on Betterton's authority, says that he was "a considerable dealer in wool." John Aubrey the antiquary, or rather quid-tunc, says that he was a butcher; in a deed dated 1579, and in another seventeen years later, he is called a yeoman; and his name appears in a list of the gentlemen and freeholders of Barlichway Hundred in 1580. One of his fellow-aldermen, who was his predecessor in the office of bailiff, was a butcher; but with our knowledge of his landed possessions and his consequent agricultural occu

pation, we may be pretty sure that his nearest approach to that useful business was in having his own cattle killed on his own premises. Wool he might well have sold from the backs of his own flocks without being properly a wool-dealer. But what was his distinctive occupation is a matter of very little consequence, except as it may have affected the early occupation of his son, and of not much, even in that regard. He was plainly in a condition of life which secured that son the means of a healthy physical and moral development, and which, if he had lived in New England a century or a century and a half later, would have made him regarded, if a well-mannered man, as fit company for the squire and the parson and the best people of the township, and emboldened him perhaps to aspire to a seat in the General Court of the Colony.

II.

Stratford on Avon, where William Shakespeare was born and bred, is a place the antiquity of which is so great as to be uncertain. It was known as Stratford or Streatford, i. e. Street-ford, three hundred years before the Conquest. Having its origin probably in a wayside ale-house, boatman's cabin, or blacksmith's forge at a ford of the Avon River, on which it stands, it grew slowly to an insignificant size through long centuries. The Avon is one of those gently flowing rural streams

which, unvexed by factories, undisturbed by traffic, and spanned by solid bridges which have sounded to the tread of mail-clad men, make the soil of England rich and her landscapes beautiful. The ford, which was the nucleus of the town, and gave it half its name, was on the high road or street which gave the other half, and which stretches from the hamlet of Henley in Arden through Stratford across the Avon on towards London; and thus the names of Shakespeare's native place, of the street on which stood his boyhood's home, and of his mother's family, were happily associated. Stratford is now a clean and quiet little place, containing about four thousand inhabitants, who seem to live comfortably enough without trade or manufactures. But in itself it has no attraction; and towards the end of the reign of that shrewd and selfish termagant whom our forefathers called Good Queen Bess, it would have appeared to modern eyes unsightly. It then contained about fifteen hundred inhabitants, who dwelt chiefly in thatched cottages, which straggled over the ground, too near together for rural beauty, too far apart to seem snug and neighborly; and scattered through the gardens and orchards around the best of these were neglected stables, cow-yards, and sheep-cotes. Many of the meaner houses were without chimneys or glazed windows. The streets were cumbered with logs and blocks, and foul with offal, mud, muck-heaps, and reeking stable refuse, the

accumulation of which the town ordinances and the infliction of fines could not prevent, even before the doors of the better sort of people. The very first we hear of John Shakespeare himself, in 1552, is that he and a certain Humphrey Reynolds and Adrian Quiney "fecerunt sterquinarium" in the quarter called Henley Street, against the order of the court; for which dirty piece of business they were "in misericordia," as they well deserved. But the next year John Shakespeare and Adrian Quiney repeated the unsavory offence, and this time in company with the bailiff himself. This noisome condition of their streets, however, did not indicate a peculiar carelessness of dirt among the Stratford folk, at a time when in noblemen's houses, and even in palaces, the great halls, in which the household ate, were offensive, because the rushes with which the floors were strewed, by way of carpet, remained until they became mouldy, and beneath were bones and crusts, dogs' refuse, that were left there to decay. Launce gives us a glimpse of the habits and manners of those days, in that touching remonstrance which he addresses to Crab, upon his sad misbehavior when he was presented to Madam Silvia. But, with the strange, sad incongruity of early times, although squalor and discomfort thus pervaded the little town of Stratford, it had public structures beautiful and venerable, such as now-a-days would not be erected in a place of fifty times its size. Now, a

rich river-side city of fifty thousand inhabitants, nearly all of whom are comfortably, and a large proportion of them elegantly, housed, is content to be approached over a serviceable wooden bridge, resting on strong, but homely, stone piers; the people worship according to their choice in various, perhaps pretty, but almost surely unpretending churches; if there be other market than the butchers' and hucksters' stalls scattered through the streets, it presents no other attractions than those of convenience and cleanliness; and there is no private dwelling so superior and lofty, that it looks down upon the others round it as the homes of an inferior caste. But the little nest of plaster-walled, thatch-roofed cottages, most of them of a single floor, in which William Shakespeare was born, was approached by a noble stone bridge of fourteen arches, built at his own expense by Sir Hugh Clopton, a Stratford grandee and Mayor of London. The single parish church was a collegiate foundation, and had had a chantry of five priests. In size it was superior to, and in general appearance not unlike, the largest church in the United States, its namesake Trinity, in New York. Its interior walls were decorated with rude but striking fresco paintings, representing, among other subjects, some groups of the Dance Macabre, otherwise known as the Dance of Death; and around its aisles and chancel end were monuments and effigies of departed great folk of that neigh