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warm, fparkling, harmonious, all chifeled with antithefes and conceits, which fhall be the language of Romeo and Juliet, of Othello and Desdemona.”

But the popularity of his early poems was of infinite advantage to him, in giving him opportunities of obferving a phafe of manners with which he could otherwise scarcely have become acquainted. It is fomething little short of miraculous how Shakespere, the son of a Warwickshire yeoman, who had never even been at the University, fhould have known how to portray men and women of rank, not only in their graver hours, but in the ease and abandonment of focial intercourse. The former he might have learnt from books, or from being prefent at great ftate folemnities, but the latter he could have known only from taking part in it. The dialogues between Prince Henry and Poyns and Falstaff, between Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio, between Rofalind, Celia, and Orlando, and between Beatrice and Benedict, are of the very best style of wellbred converfation. It is fufficiently wonderful how, under any circumftances, he could have fo accurately caught the tone of good fociety. We fee daily how very indifferently even clever novelifts, who have lived amongst fashionable people all their lives, depict their manners. Shakefpere, of course, could not have attained this excellence by fimple intuition. He must have somewhere seen the

original from which he drew. I think it is probable, therefore, that his early poems were the means of introducing him to the fociety of people of refinement and high breeding, whofe manners his extraordinary powers of perception enabled him fo accurately to obferve and reproduce. And thus, I think, the poems, and the fame they brought him, may have combined to prepare Shakefpere for the great dramatic career which his father's misfortunes and his own were the means of opening to him in London.

CHAPTER IX.

SHAKESPERE was one of thofe men who have got a great deal into a short life. Before he had attained the age of thirty he had fown fome very wild oats at Stratford, and got into confiderable trouble; he had managed his love-making and matrimonial affairs in such a way as not by any means to smooth his way out of his difficulties; he had gone to London a ruined man, with a very flender education, and had adopted the first menial office which promised him bread; but by the time that he was thirty, he found himself established amongst the foremoft poets of a poetic age, gaining a handfome competence as author, actor, and shareholder in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, the envy of his profligate and unhappy fellow-dramatifts, like Green, and the friend of men of rank and refinement, like Southampton.

But while all these honours and emoluments were flowing in upon him in London, he still confidered

the little village in Warwickshire where he was born as his real home. Aubrey fays that he "was wont to goe to his native countreye once a yeare;" and there is a tradition that on these occafions he used to take up his quarters at the Crown inn, near Carfax, at Oxford. The house is now divided into shops, but retains much of its ancient character. It was kept by one Davenant, father of Sir William Davenant, the dramatist, in connection with whom a fcandalous ftory was in circulation, after the Restoration, refpecting the Poet; but as it is grounded upon no tangible evidence I do not care to record it. At Stratford it is probable he left his wife and family during his early ftruggles, and we may fancy how refreshing it must have been to the countryloving Poet to revifit every year the scenes of his early adventures, and to fee his young family growing up, while he felt that he was every year increasing his means of providing for them. A family merrymaking, at which the Combes, Hathaways, Halls, Ardens, would meet over a bowl of lambfwool, was in his eyes better than the wit-combats at the "Mermaid." With what delight muft he have feen the Avon flowing majestically at the foot of the town by the fine old church! How pleasant must have appeared to him the glades and groves of Charlecote and Fulbrooke after the "melancholy of Houndfditch!" And how fweet must

have founded to him the cry of the hounds in the woodlands of Arden. Probably quite as sweet as the plaudits of the theatre.

Indeed, one of the most curious traits of his character was his love for an unambitious country life in his native town. Like another of the world's great poets, he really might say—

"Flumina amem fylvafque inglorius."

He seems to have looked upon his literary fame only as a means to enable him to retire honourably to Stratford; and he was content that to be the author of

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Hamlet," "Lear," "The Tempeft," "As You Like It," and the rest of those great works which will last out the English language, fhould bring him no higher reward than might have been gained by a career of fuccefsful farming or trade.

This is a very English feeling. Horace Walpole was rather ashamed of being a literary man; Walter Scott was much prouder of being the Laird of Abbotsford than the author of "Waverley;" and I fancy that Mr. Anthony Trollope, when got up in his "pink ” and "tops," and standing by a covert in the Rodings waiting for a fox to be found, would confider it very bad taste for any one to allude to "The Small House at Allington." A foreigner cannot understand this

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