confession of faith which was found in repairing the roof of his residence at Stratford. But, whatever were his own deficiencies, he was careful that the talents of his son should not suffer from a similar neglect of education. William was placed at the Free School of Stratford; it is not uninteresting to know the names of the instructors of Shakspeare. They have been traced by the minute researches of Malone. Mr. Thomas Hunt, and Mr. Thomas Jenkins, were successively the masters of the school, from 1572 to 1580, which must have included the school-boy days of our poet.

At this time, Shakspeare would have possessed ample means of obtaining access to all those books of history, poetry, and romance, with which he seems to have had so intimate an acquaintance, and which were calculated to attract his early taste, and excite the admiration of his young and ardent fancy; and he might also thus carly have become imbued with a taste for the drama, by attending the performances of the different companies of players, the comedians of the Queen, of the Earl of Worcester, of Lord Leicester, and of other noblemen, who were continually making the Guildhall of Stratford the scene of their representations. But he was soon called to other cares, and the discharge of more serious duties. The prosperity of his father was not of permanent duration. In 1578, Mr. John Shakspeare mortgaged the estate which he had received from his wife; in the following year he was exempted from the contribution of four-pence a week for the poor, which was paid by the other aldermen; and that this exception in his favor was made in consequence of the pecuniary embarrassments under which he was known to labor, is manifest from his having been at the same period reduced to the necessity of obtaining Mr. Lambert's security for the payment of a debt of five pounds, to Sadler, a baker. This depression of his circumstances is alluded to by Rowe, and attributed to the expenses incidental to a large and increasing family; but in this statement, the real cause of his difficulties is mistaken. It has been ascertained, by the diligence of Malone, that the family of Shakspeare's father was by no means numerous; for of his eight children, five only attained to the age of maturity. The

decay of his affairs was the natural consequence of the de cline of the branch of trade in which he was engaged. As a wool-stapler, Mr. John Shakspeare had flourished as long as the business itself was prosperous; and with its failure, his fortunes had fallen into decay. He became involved in the I gradual ruin which fell on the principal trade of the place, and which, in 1599, drew from the bailiff and burgesses of Stratford, a supplication to the Lord Treasurer Burghley, lamenting the distresses of the town; "for want of such trade as heretofore they had by clothinge, and making of yarne, ymploying and mayntayninge a number of poore people by the same, which now live in great pentry and miserie, by reason they are not set at worke, as before they have been."

In this unfavorable state of the affairs of his family, Shakspeare was withdrawn from school; "his assistance was wanted at home." It was, I should imagine, at this juncture, that his father, no longer able to secure a respectable subsistence for his wife and children, by his original trade as a wool-stapler, had recourse to the inferior occupation of a butcher; and, if the tale be founded in fact, which Aubrey says "he was told heretofore by some of his neighbours," then it must have been, that Shakspeare began to exhibit his dramatic propensities, and "when he killed a calfe, would do it in a high style, and make a speech."

The assistance, however, which the poet rendered his father in his business, was not of long duration. He had just attained the age of eighteen, when he was married. The object of this early attachment was Anne, the daughter of Richard Hathaway, a substantial yeoman, in the neighborhood of his native town. She was eight years older than her husband; and Oldys, without stating his authority, in one of his MSS. mentions her as beautiful. It may be feared that this marriage was not perfectly happy. From the celebrated passage in Twelfth Night, concluding with

"Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent,"

we may suspect that Shakspeare, at the time of writing this,

which was probably his last play, had lived to repent his too early marriage, and the indulgence of an affection so much "misgrafted in respect of years." Such is the conjecture of Malone; but it is hardly fair to apply personally to the poet the general maxims that may be discovered in his works. His daughter Susanna was born in the following year. The parish register of Stratford informs us that within eighteen months afterwards his wife bore twins, a son and daughter, who were baptized by the names of Hamnet and Judith and thus, when little more than twenty, Shakspeare had already a wife and three children dependent on his exertions for support.

Malone supposes that our author was at this time employed in an attorney's office, and gives a long list of quotations from his works, which show how familiarly he was acquainted with the terms and the usages of the law, in support of his conjecture. As there are no other grounds for entertaining such a supposition; as testimony of the same nature, and equally strong, might be adduced to prove that Shakspeare was a member of almost every other trade or profession, for he was ignorant of none; and as the legal knowledge which he displays might easily have been caught up in conversation, or indeed from experience in the quirks and technicalities of the law, during the course of his own and his father's difficulties; I have little hesitation in classing this among the many ingenious but unsound conjectures of the learned editor, and adopting the tradition of Aubrey respecting the avocation of this portion of his life. To satisfy the claims that were multiplying around him, Shakspeare endeavored to draw upon his talents and acquirements as the source of his supplies, and undertook the instruction of children.

The portion of classical knowledge that he brought to the task, has given occasion for much controversy, which it is now impossible to determine. The school at which he was educated, produced several individuals, among the contem poraries of our great poet, who were not deficient in learning; and though he was prematurely withdrawn from their com panionship, it would be difficult to believe, that with his

quickness of apprehension, he could have mingled for any considerable time in their course of study, without attaining a proportionate share of their information. "He understood Latin pretty well," says Aubrey; and this account corresponds exactly with the description of his friend Ben Jonson, who speaks of him as one possessed "of little Latin and less Greek." Dr. Farmer, indeed, has proved, that translations of all the classics to which Shakspeare has referred, were already in circulation before he wrote; and that in most of his allusions to Greek and Latin authors, evident traces are discoverable of his having consulted the translation instead of the original. But this fact establishes very little: it might have proceeded from indolence, or from the haste of composition, urging him to the readiest sources of information, rather than from any incapacity of availing himself of those which were more pure, but less accessible. That he should appear unlearned in the judgment of Jonson, who, perhaps, measured him by the scale of his own enormous erudition, is no imputation on his classical attainments. A man may have made great advances in the knowledge of the dead languages, and yet be esteemed as having "little Latin and less Greek," by one who has reached those heights of scholarship, which the friend and companion of Shakspeare had achieved. It is a proof that his acquirements in the classic languages were considerable, or Jonson would scarcely have deemed them of sufficient value to be at all numbered among his qualifications. As to French, it is certain he did not deal with translations only; for the last line of one of his most celebrated speeches, the Seven Ages of Man, in As you like it, is imitated from a poem called the Henriade, which was first published in 1594, in France, and never translated. Garnier, the author of it, is describing the appearance of the ghost of Admiral Coligny, on the night after his murder, at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and introduces the follow ing passage:

Sans pieds, sans mains, sans nez, sans oreilles, sans yeux,
Meurtri de toutes parts.

The verse of Shakspeare,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing,

scarcely exceeds the rules of legitimate translation; and the introduction and repetition of the French preposition, indicates that the coincidence was intentional, and stands as an acknowledgment of the imitation. Mr. Capel Lofft has, perhaps, very fairly estimated the extent of Shakspeare's literary acquirements: "He had what would now be considered a very reasonable proportion of Latin; he was not wholly ignorant of Greek; he had a knowledge of the French so as to read it with ease; and I believe not less of the Italian. He was habitually conversant in the chronicles of his country. He had deeply imbibed the Scriptures.". And again, in speaking of his Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, which were the first published efforts of Shakspeare's genius, Mr. Lofft continues: "I think it not easy, with due attention to these poems, to doubt of his having acquired, when a boy, no ordinary facility in the classic language of Rome; and, when Jonson said he had less Greek,' had it been true that he had none, it would have been as easy for the verse as for the sentiment, to have said no Greek.'"

With these qualifications for the task, Shakspeare applied himself to the labor of tuition. But both the time and the habits of his life, rendered him peculiarly unfit for the situation. The gaiety of his disposition naturally inclined him to society; and the thoughtlessness of youth prevented his being sufficiently scrupulous about the conduct and the characters of his associates. "He had by a misfortune, common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company," says Rowe; and the excesses into which they seduced him, were by no means consistent with that seriousness of deportment and behavior which is expected to accompany the occupation that he had adopted. The following anecdote of these days of his riot, is still current at Stratford, and the neighboring village of Bidford. I give it in the words of the author from whom it is taken. Speaking of Bidford, he says, "there were anciently two societies of village-yeomanry in this place, who frequently met under the appellation of Bidford topers. It was a custom of these heroes to challenge any of their neighbors, famed for the love of good ale, to a drunken com. bat: among others, the people of Stratford were called out