the seeming lad to whom it is addressed is about his years, and the man who utters it about Anne Hathaway's, at the time when they were married.

After considering all that has been said, which is quite all that can reasonably be said, about the custom of troth-plight in mitigation of the circumstances of Shakespeare's marriage, I cannot regard the case as materially bettered. It has been urged that Shakespeare put a plea for his wife into the mouth of the Priest in Twelfth Night, where the holy man says to Olivia that there had passed between her and Sebastian

"A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact

Sealed in my function, by my testimony."

Act V. Sc. I.

But what this was is shown by Olivia's language at the time when it took place, in a passage which the apologists leave out of sight.

"Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,

Now go with me, and with this holy man,

Into the chantry by: there, before him,
And underneath that consecrated roof,
Plight me the full assurance of your faith;
That my most jealous and too doubtful soul
May live at peace. He shall conceal it,
Whiles you are willing it shall come to note;
What time we will our celebration keep
According to my birth. — What do you say?"
Act IV. Sc. 3.

This plainly was a private marriage, in church and by a priest; indissoluble and perfect, except that it lacked consummation and celebration according to the lady's birth. As to troth-plight, its import depends entirely upon that to which troth is plighted. The closing words of the binding declaration in the marriage ceremony of the Church of England are, "and thereto I plight thee my troth."

The marriage between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway took place in December, 1582. The ceremony was not performed in Stratford ; and no record of it has been discovered. But there is a tradition in Luddington, a little village not far off, that it took place there; and the story derives some support from the fact that Thomas Hunt, Shakespeare's schoolmaster, was curate of that parish. Susanna, the first child born in this wedlock, was baptized May 26th, 1583; and Hamnet and Judith, twins, were baptized February 2d, 1584-5. William Shakespeare and his wife had no other children; and soon after the latter event their household married life was interrupted for many years by the departure of the youthful husband from Stratford. The eldest son of a ruined man just degraded from office, having four brothers and sisters younger than himself, and a wife and three children upon his hands before he was twenty-one, there were reasons enough for him to go, as he did, to London, if he could get money there more rapidly than at Stratford. But tradi

tion assigns a particular occasion and other motive for his leaving home. Betterton heard, and Rowe tells us, that he fell into bad company, and that some of his wild companions, who made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, drew him into the robbery of a park belonging to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote. For this, according to Rowe's story, he was prosecuted by the knight, and in revenge lampooned him in a ballad so bitter that the prosecution became a persecution of such severity that he was obliged to flee the country, and shelter himself in London. There is what may perhaps be accepted as independent authority for the existence of this tradition. The Reverend William Fulman, an antiquary, who died in 1688, bequeathed his manuscript biographical memorandums to the Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton in Gloucestershire, and Archdeacon of Lichfield, who died in 1708. To a note of Fulman's, which barely records Shakespeare's birth, death, and occupation, Davies made brief additions, the principal of which is, that William Shakespeare was "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from S― Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country, to his great advancement: but his revenge was so great that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that in allusion to his name bore three louses rampant for his arms." Davies may

have heard this story in Stratford; but considering the date of his death, 1708, and that of Betterton's visit to Warwickshire, 1675, and Rowe's publication of his edition of Shakespeare's Works, 1709, it is not at all improbable, to say the least, that the story had reached the Archdeacon directly or indirectly through the actor.* But Capell tells us that a Mr. Thomas Jones, who lived at Tarbick, a few miles from Stratford, and who died there in 1703, more than ninety years of age, remembered having heard from old people at Stratford the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park. According to Mr. Jones their story agreed with that told by Rowe, with this addition, that the lampoon was stuck upon the park gate, and that this insult, added to the injury of the deer-stealing, provoked the prosecution. Mr. Jones had written down the first stanza of

* Betterton was born in 1635, and went upon the stage in 1656 or 1657. The veneration for Shakespeare with which he was imbued by the study of his plays was the motive of his pilgrimage to Stratford. We may be quite sure that the journey was undertaken after 1670, for in that year Shakespeare's granddaughter, who must have known much that Betterton did not discover, died in Shakespeare's house; and it could hardly have been after 1675, for at that time the great actor was grievously afflicted with a disease, the gout, which compelled him to retire from the stage, and from which he suffered until it caused his death, in 1710. Betterton had been taught to play some of Shakespeare's principal characters by Sir William Davenant, who had seen them performed by actors of the Black-friars Theatre, who had been instructed by the poet himself. See Downes's Roscius Anglicanus. Notes and Various Readings, &c., Vol. II. p. 75.

L

this ballad, and it reached Capell through his own grandfather, a contemporary of Jones. A similar account of a very old man living near Stratford, and remembering the deer-stealing story and the ballad, is given by Oldys, the antiquarian, in his manuscript notes. Oldys and Capell plainly derived their information from the same source, though possibly through different channels; and the stanza of the ballad is given by both of them in the same words, with the exception of a single syllable. These are the lines according to Oldys, with the addition of "O" in the last line, which appears in Capell's copy, and which plainly belongs there:

"A parliemente member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scare-crowe, at London an asse,
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it :
He thinks himself greate,

Yet an asse in his state

We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,
Sing O lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it."

The phrase "Parliament member," if we must accept it as having been originally written in the first line of this lampoon, is inconsistent with its genuineness; for in Shakespeare's time, and long after, the phrase was Parliament man. But as the verses were handed down orally, a conformity to the more recent custom in this respect would creep in easily and unnoticed.