don constable could have been the person so honored, for unless he had attained an incredible age in the year 1642, he would have been too young for the prototype. It is far more likely that the satire was generally applicable to the English constables of the author's period, to such as were those in the neighborhood of London at the time of his arrival there, and who are so graphically thus described in a letter from Lord Burghley to Sir Francis Walsingham, written in 1586,-"as I came from London homeward in my coach, I saw at every town's end the number of ten or twelve standing with long staves, and, until I came to Enfield, I thought no other of them but that they had stayed for avoiding of the rain, or to drink at some alehouses, for so they did stand under pentices at alehouses; but at Enfield, finding a dozen in a plump when there was no rain, I bethought myself that they were appointed as watchmen for the apprehending of such as are missing; and thereupon I called some of them to me apart, and asked them wherefore they stood there, and one of them answered, to take three young men; and, demanding how they should know know the persons, Marry, said they, one of the parties hath a hooked nose; and have you, quoth I, no other mark? No, said they. Surely, sir, these watchmen stand so openly in plumps as no suspected person will come near them, and if they be no better instructed but to find three persons by one of them having a hooked nose, they may miss thereof."

It was toward the close of the present year, 1600, or at some time in the following one, that Shakespeare, for the first and only time, came forward in the avowed character of a philosophical writer. One Robert Chester

was the author of a long and tedious poem, which was issued in 1601, under the title of,-Love's Martyr or Rosalins Complaint, allegorically shadowing the truth of Love in the constant fate of the Phoenix and Turtle, and to these are added some new compositions of severall moderne writers, whose names are subscribed to their severall workes, upon the first subject; viz., the Phoenix and Turtle. The latter were stated, in a separate title page, to have been "done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes; never before extant; and now first consecrated by them all generally to the love and merite of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie”,— the names of Shakespeare, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson being attached to the recognized pieces of this latter series. The contribution of the great dramatist is a remarkable poem in which he makes a notice of the obsequies of the phoenix and turtle-dove subservient to the delineation of spiritual union. It is generally thought that, in his own works, Chester meditated a personal allegory, but, if that be the case, there is nothing to indicate that Shakespeare participated in the design, nor even that he had endured the punishment of reading Love's Martyr.

The commencement of this year, 1601, is memorable for the development and suppression of the Essex conspiracy, one of the most singular events of the Queen's reign, and one in which Shakespeare's company was transiently implicated. The general history of this remarkable movement is too familiar to us all to sanction its repetition, but it is not so generally known that the Earl's friends, in their anxiety to seize every opportunity of influencing public opinion in favor of their schemes,

negotiated with the Lord Chamberlain's Servants for the representation at the Globe Theater of a drama that evinced a political significance in its treatment of the deposition of Richard II. The conspirators had selected as the one most suitable for their design a play that had been already exhibited on the stage, but, in a discussion on the subject with a few of the actors, it was strongly urged by the latter that the composition in question had so out-grown its popularity that a serious loss on its revival would inevitably accrue; and, under these circumstances, it was arranged that forty shillings should be paid to the company in augmentation of their receipts on the occasion. The interview at which this compromise was effected took place on Friday, February 6, a "play of the deposing and killing of King Richard," one which also dealt, it would appear, with a portion of the reign of his successor, being represented at the Globe on the afternoon of the following day; but none of the persons engaged in these transactions had then the remotest idea that the latter were to be immediately followed by the premature outbreak of the insurrection.

The rapidity, indeed, with which events now moved have most likely hidden from us forever the contem porary light in which the proceedings at the Globe were viewed; but that the public exhibition at this juncture of the history of the deposition of Richard was an unwonted bold step on the part of the company cannot admit of a question. Some of its members, at all events, and most probably all, must have been aware of the Queen's preternatural sensitiveness in everything that related to that history; so that it is difficult to avoid the impression that the leaders of the

theater shared in the all but universal desire of the community for the restoration of Essex to power. It is true that Shakespeare's friend and colleague, Augustine Phillipps, in an affidavit sworn before three of the judges eleven days afterwards, assigns the initiative of the pecuniary offer to the conspirators, but that offer of forty shillings, if viewed on either side as a bribe, was certainly too moderate an amount to have overcome the scruples of unwilling agents in so considerable a risk, and too much reliance should not be placed upon the terms of a document that may have been signed under conditions that admitted of serious peril to the witness and his friends. Now that the game was irretrievably lost, and the power of a despotic government again supreme, it is most likely that Phillipps dexterously said as little about the affair as he dared, and yet just enough to save himself and the other actors at the Globe from being, to use an expressive phrase of the time, "wrecked on the Essex coast." That they altogether escaped this calamity may be gathered from the fact that they performed before the Queen at Richmond Palace on Shrove Tuesday, February 24, the very evening before the lamented death of Essex; but it should be borne in mind that the selection of that movable feast-day for the performance was merely owing to the following of a longestablished custom, not the result of a special order; and Elizabeth, now that the dangers to which she had been exposed were over, had too much wisdom, whatever she may have known or thought respecting their doings on the seventh, to make an impolitic display of superfluous animosities. Least of all is it probable that she would have been inclined, excepting in a case of dire emergency,

to have visited her displeasure upon the humble ministers of one of her favorite amusements, persons, moreover, who were then regarded in about the same light with jugglers and buffoons. As to her appearance at a theatrical representation the night before the execution, that was not more unseemly than her amusing herself by playing on the virginals the following morning, all this outward heartlessness emanating from a determination to assume before the court a demeanor of indifference to the cruel destiny of her quondam favorite.

That the poet was intimately acquainted, so far at least as the extreme social distinctions of the age permitted, with some of the leading members of the conspiracy, may be fairly assumed. It is all but impossible that he should not have been well-known to the readily-accessible Essex, -the object of the graceful compliment in the last act of King Henry the Fifth,-one who was not only distinguished by his widely extended impartial and generous patronage of literature and its votaries, but the bosom friend of Shakespeare's own Mæcenas. Then there were the Earl of Rutland, the frequent companion of the latter at the public theaters, and Sir Charles Percy, who, only a few weeks before the performance at the Globe, had shown how deeply he had been impressed by the humor of the Second Part of Henry the Fourth. But there is no evidence that tends to associate the great dramatist with any kind of participation in the furtherance of the objects of the conspirators beyond, of course, the natural inference that he shared with his colleagues the responsibility of their theatrical proceedings on February 7.

Apart from all this, even if it were thought possible that Shakespeare could have been altogether ignorant of