borhood. There was the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross, a fine, well-proportioned building of the earlier Tudor style of ecclesiastical architecture, and some parts of it very much older, which, after the dissolution of religious houses by that conscientious Protestant, Henry VIII., had been used by the endowed and incorporated Grammar School of Stratford. The walls of this building were also decorated with paintings of sacred and historical subjects. In the open place, where the markets and the fairs were held, was a market cross with clock and belfry, from the steps of which the public crier performed his clamorous duty. Hard by the Chapel of the Guild was the Great House, or New Place, a grand mansion then a hundred years old, and more, built by Sir Hugh Clopton, of bridge memory, who lived and died there; and near the Great House was the college, a fine monastic structure, which had been converted into a dwelling, and where lived one John a Combe, a wealthy gentleman who lent money upon interest and good security. From the narrow limits of the town the country stretched away, with gentle undulations, into a broad expanse of meadows and cornfields, bright with grass and grain, laced with little brooks and divided by the ever stone-bridged Avon, dotted with old clumps of trees, darkened with remnants of the ancient forest, enlivened with rustic hamlets, and adorned with parks and gardens. Clopton House, old,

manorial, and substantial, the home of Sir Hugh's family, was only two miles off; and about four miles distant, on another road, was Charlecote, a new country-seat built by Sir Thomas Lucy, in the form of an E, to please his royal mistress, insatiable of flattery. Only nine miles away was the county town, and the grand old feudal pile of Warwick Castle, dating back to the time of Alfred, of which William Shakespeare's maternal ancestor had been governor; and five miles farther was Kenilworth, not quite so old, but not less magnificent, where the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favorite, was lately come as lord, and where within a few years he had spent £60,000, or according to our present measure of value $1,500,000, in making the place grand and beautiful.

It was in such a town and amid such a country that William Shakespeare passed his early years; and a glance at them has been worth our while; for when he left them for a wider, busier, and more varied field of observation, marvellous as were the flexibility of his nature and the range and activity of his thought, his memory never lost the forms, nor did his soul cast off the influences, which had surrounded him in boyhood. As to the people of Stratford, they were much like others of their class and condition; simple folk, contentedly looking after their fields, their cattle, and their little trade, not troubling themselves about the great world which lay beyond their ken, but somewhat over

ready to take the law of one another upon small provocation, and strongly inclined to Puritanism. If they had one trait which seems more prominent than any other, it was a great capacity for liquor, which they tested on every possible occasion. The sums which they spent in providing themselves and each other, and the strangers within their gates, with ale possets, claret, and sack and sugar, must have been no small proportion of the yearly outlay of the town. And yet perhaps in this respect they were but of their day and generation.

What was the education of William Shakespeare were a question indeed of interest to all reasonable creatures, and to those who think that education makes great men, of singular importance. But of his teachers we know nothing, save of one, - his father. What were his mother's traits of character, and whether she had transmitted any of them to her son, we cannot tell. In which ignorance there is a kind of bliss to those people who have taken up the novel notion of the day, that men of mark derive their mental and their moral gifts, not from the father, but the mother. A fungus fancy, which must have sprung up while men could forget that Philip the Great of Macedon was eclipsed by his son Alexander ; that there was a family of Scipios, all eminent; that Hamilcar, one of the master generals and

statesmen of antiquity, would have come down to us as the great Carthaginian, had his abilities and his fortunes not been surpassed by those of his son Hannibal; that Charles Martel, a born king of men, who founded a great monarchy, was father to Pepin, who, with the new-created power which he inherited, inherited also the ability to preserve, to consolidate, and extend it, and whose son was the central figure of the Middle Ages, the imperial Charlemagne; that Henry II., great after the fashion of his time and of the Plantagenets, transmitted all his energy, his craft, and his military genius to his son Richard the Lionhearted, great also after the Plantagenet fashion, and who equalled him in most of his qualities and surpassed him in others; that strong-minded, strong-willed Henry VIII. had his strong-minded, strong-willed daughter Elizabeth by that weak coquette, Anne Boleyn; that his great Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was son to Sir Thomas More, Justice of the King's Bench, a man "of excellent wit and judgment," yet surpassed by his son in these points, as in others; that William, the great Prince of Orange, was succeeded by his son, Prince Maurice of Nassau, one of the two great captains of his day; that William Pitt, called "the Great Commoner," who became Earl of Chatham, had for his son the other William Pitt, the greater commoner, while Chatham's most formidable rival, Henry Fox,

who raised himself to be first Lord Holland, transmitted his talents, though not his titles or his lands, to his yet more eminent son, Charles James Fox; and that Julius Scaliger would have been the first of scholars and critics, had not the splendid abilities of his son, Joseph Scaliger, made him the second. The Mendelssohn who came between Moses the scholar and Felix the musician used smilingly to say that he was the son of the great Mendelssohn and the father of the great Mendelssohn. But this single case would prove nothing, even if it were true that the middleman had a woman of mark for his wife. Intellect, like gout, sometimes skips a generation, yet none the less follows the blood; but sometimes it is also inherited by immediate descent. The truth is, that upon the very interesting subject of transmitted qualities in the human race, we know almost nothing. But we do know that, in Shakespeare's own words, "good wombs have borne bad sons"; and even a little observation will discover that the converse is equally true, and that mothers, as well as fathers, of vicious character or feeble intellect have had children born to them upon whose moral integrity or mental endowments they have looked with perplexity and wonder.*

*Whoever thinks this subject of sufficient interest and moment to examine it, could not fail, I am sure, to add many similar and perhaps more striking examples to those above mentioned,