Arden; and the "yard and a half" of arable soil tilled by Richard Shakespeare and his neighbours must have been a mere clearing in the wilderness. Indeed, much of the surrounding land was waste within memory, and is still poor ground, though the adjacent hill of Ingon looks down on rich pastures and wide teeming fields.

In the reign of Henry the Eighth, and for at least half a century later, a large part of England was forest or common, and wore the wild, rude dress of nature, being here smooth as the sward of a park, there an impassable fen, or overgrown with blooming heather. Cultivation appeared only in patches, surrounding miserable hovels of lath and mud, which gave shelter to the farmer and his hinds. Snitterfield was but a couple of miles from the great forest of Arden, which still studs the country with copse and thicket and clumps of trees, far beyond Henley :—

“That mighty Arden, even in her height of pride,

Her one hand touching Trent, the other, Severn's side."

The commons afforded pasture to numerous flocks, the care of which formed the chief employment of the rural population; and it is not unlikely that it occupied some of the time of Richard Shakespeare. In that case he may be the original of Corin, in 'As You Like It,'-the venerable old shepherd, who lived" in the skirt of the forest," the forest of Arden! Here were an ancestor ennobled by his own words :-" Sir, I am a true labourer: get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is, to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck." The pastoral characters of Shakespeare are all conceived in this strain, and breathe the same spirit,—an appreciation natural in one who had sprung from a dynasty of husbandmen.

There was nothing remarkable in a peasant of Warwickshire, a wool county, possessing two or three sheep, as we may see by the will of John Shakesper, the "labourer," who left his sister Alice a lamb. Sheep were then of a diminutive size, and were valued at two and eightpence, about ten shillings of our money, means of Richard of Snitterfield. purchase naturally fell under the while the others assisted him in the culture of his acreage ; and we may conjecture that some such early occupation determined the calling of his son John.

which was not above the The few he contrived to care of one of his sons,

There is no means of ascertaining the ages of Richard Shakespeare's children, as the earliest Snitterfield register is dated only from the 13th of January, 1561, when they had attained manhood; for John Shakespeare is found residing at Stratford in 1552.1

The family seems to have consisted of three sons, John, Henry, and Thomas; and as the Greens of Stratford called the poet their cousin, it is probable that Richard Shakespeare had also a daughter, who relinquished her poetic name to become a Green.3

1 Malone did not meet with the name before 1555, when it appears in the records of the Bailiff's Court, and Shakespeare's other biographers all adopt this date as the earliest mention of the name. But the late Mr. Hunter discovered that John Shakespeare was present at a court held at Stratford on the 29th April, 1552, though he was not assessed to the payment of the relief granted in 1549-50; consequently, he must have taken up his residence at Stratford about 1551.

2 The baptism of a son of Thomas Shaxper is recorded in the parish register of Snitterfield under the date of the 10th March, 1581; and an entry on the 4th September, 1586, mentions Henry Shaxper as god-father to Henry Townsend. The registry notes the burial of Henry Saxpere on the 29th December, 1596, and of Margret Saxspere, his widow, on the 9th February, 1596-7.

3 The cousinship of the Greens may have been derived from the stepsister of Shakespeare's mother, Mary Hill, whose eldest daughter, Eleanor, married William Green, of Alne.

The cottage of a Dorsetshire labourer of the present day, the extreme of what we know of English misery, would appear to advantage by the side of the lowly dwelling of these Shakespeares. In the cabins of the peasantry, there was then neither floor beneath the feet nor ceiling overhead: the thatch and bending rafters were blackened with smoke, which could only escape by the door; and a table and rude benches, with the commonest household service, composed all the furniture. At night the family took their repose on a pallet of straw or a coarse mat, and their pillow was a log of wood or a sack of chaff. The first light called them again to labour, so that the sons of Richard Shakespeare were trained to industry from childhood, and received no teaching but in the sweat of their brow.

At what age John Shakespeare left Snitterfield, no one has ventured to conjecture, and the same uncertainty prevails as to his first calling. By a singular coincidence, the founder of the English drama, and Chaucer, the founder of English poetry, stand in the same situation in this respect; for while we are left in doubt whether Chaucer was the son of a knight, a gentleman, or a vintner, it is not agreed whether the father of Shakespeare was a glover, a woolstapler, or a butcher. But it would seem, after all, that we have made a millstone of a very palpable fact.

The first actual memoir of Shakespeare was composed a hundred years after his death, by the poet Rowe; and consisted of about eight pages. The author wrote under the inspiration of Betterton the actor, who, from constantly realizing Shakespeare's creations on the stage, conceived for the great dramatist a veneration such as it was customary for a pupil of ancient Greece to feel for his master. In this spirit he went down to Warwickshire to collect the traditions of his life, as Xenophon collected the vestiges of Socrates. We yield a ready respect to the statements of

such a disciple, but his Memorabilia, unlike Xenophon's, come to us from another pen, and Rowe gives them his own colouring. A desire to exalt Shakespeare according to the notions then prevalent, led him in some cases to suppress, and in others to expand facts, which were doubtless faithfully communicated by Betterton, but now conveyed an erroneous impression. Thus the latter had seen that John Shakespeare was called "magister," and Shakespeare himself styled "gentleman" in the public records of Stratford, which draws from Rowe the flourish that bis family were of figure and fashion in that town. In the same way, John Shakespeare is described as "a considerable dealer in wool," a calling he certainly followed in later life, but Rowe refrains from shocking his generation with the disclosure that he had. previously been a butcher.

Such considerations had no influence with Malone, who may justly be called the historian of Shakespeare. Coming to the work about eighty years later, he followed the footprints of the poet and his family with unwearied diligence, exploring every source of information, bringing to light facts which but for him had been lost, and which form the staple of all later biographers. He found an entry in the register of the Stratford Bailiff's Court of an action tried before John Burbage the bailiff, on the 17th June, 1555, to recover the sum of eight pounds from "Johannem Shakyspere, de Stretford, in county Warwick, glover," and concluded that he had here ascertained the trade of the poet's father. But this John Shakespeare must rather be the person who is mentioned in the municipal records as having prepared the accounts of the two chamberlains on the 15th of February, 1566. Like the Clerk of Chatham, he could "write and

The entry mentions "the account of William Tylor and William Smythe, chamberlains, made by John Shakspeyr the 15th day of February, in the eighth year of the reign of our sovereign lady Elizabeth.”

read and cast accompt." It is now clearly established that the John Shakespeare we are in quest of could not write his name, but had to himself a mark, "like an honest plaindealing man," though Mr. Halliwell pronounces him and the accountant to be one and the same person, overlooking the impossibility of an account being drawn up by a man ignorant of writing. The circumstance that the veritable John Shakespeare was himself afterwards chamberlain does not reconcile us to such a contradiction; for, like William Tylor and William Smythe, he might have his accounts prepared by another hand-by his namesake. Nothing is more certain than that he could not be the person here mentioned. There were thus two Dromios in Stratford; and if so, we have not only no ground for believing, but every reason to doubt, that the poet's father was a glover.

The memoir by Rowe was preceded by some valuable memoranda furnished to Dugdale by Aubrey, the antiquary, who was in the habit of going through the land, like Burns's Grose, "takin' notes." His account is always considered as being some twenty years earlier than that of Rowe, because that was the time it was given to the world; but a little examination will show that the facts were really acquired half a century before, in 1642. Aubrey was then at Oxford, and his attention had been directed to Shakespeare both by Joseph Howe, who was a fellow-parishioner of the original of Dogberry, and by the traditions of the Crown tavern, so that he would naturally be tempted to visit Stratford while he was in its neighbourhood. This was only twenty-six years after the poet's death. Many of his "neighbours" still survived; and from them Aubrey learnt that John Shakespeare was a butcher.

In whatever way John Shakespeare came to settle at Stratford, he was not in good odour at the moment when he first appears; for the earliest mention of him-in 1552,