least hastened, by the family of the bride; and this surmise finds its possible confirmation in the fact that the marriage took place about the time of the execution of the bond on November 28, 1582, while the poet's first child, his daughter Susannah, was christened in Holy Trinity, at Stratford, on the 26th day of May, 1583. It has been suggested on high authority that a formal betrothal, of the kind which had the moral weight of marriage, had taken place. The absence of any reference to the groom's family in the marriage bond makes this doubtful. These are the facts so far as they have been discovered; it ought to be remembered, as part of the history of this episode in Shakespeare's life, that he was a boy of eighteen at the time of his marriage, and that Anne Hathaway was eight years his senior.

That he was an ardent and eloquent lover it is impossible to doubt; the tradition that he was an unhappy husband is based entirely on the assumption that, while his family remained in Stratford, for twelve years he was almost continuously absent in London, and that he seems to speak with deep feeling about the disastrous effects of too great intimacy before marriage, and of the importance of a woman's marrying a man older than herself:

let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.

This is, however, pure inference, and it is perilous to draw inferences of this kind from phrases which a

dramatist puts into the mouths of men and women who are interpreting, not their author's convictions and feelings, but a phase of character, a profound human experience, or the play of that irony which every playwright from Eschylus to Ibsen has felt deeply. The dramatist reveals his personality as distinctly as does the lyric poet, but not in the same way. Shakespeare's view of life, his conception of human destiny, his attitude toward society, his ideals of character, are to be found, not in detached passages framed and coloured by dramatic necessities, but in the large and consistent conception of life which underlies the entire body of his work; in the justice and sanity with which the external deed is bound to the inward impulse and the visible penalty developed out of the invisible sin; in the breadth of outlook upon human experience, the sanity and balance of judgment, the clarity and sweetness of temper which kept an imagination always brooding over the tragic possibilities of experience, and haunted by all manner of awful shapes of sin, misery, and madness, poised in health, vigour, and radiant serenity.

It is perilous to draw any inference as to the happiness or unhappiness which came into Shakespeare's life with his rash marriage. It is true that he spent many years in London; but when he had been there only eleven years, and was still a young man, he secured a home for himself in Stratford. He became a resident of his native place when he was still in middle life; there is evidence that his interest in Stratford and his communication with it were never interrupted;

that his care not only for his family but for his father was watchful and efficient; there is no reason to doubt that, taking into account the difficulties and expense of travel, his visits to his home were frequent; there is no evidence that his family was not with him at times in London. In this aspect of his life, as in many others, absence of detailed and trustworthy information furnishes no ground for inferences unfavourable to his happiness or his integrity.

The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's leaving Stratford is a matter of minor importance; the poaching episode may have hastened it, but could hardly have determined a career so full of the power of selfdirection. Sooner or later he must have gone to London, for London was the one place in England which could afford him the opportunity which his genius demanded. It cannot be doubted that through all the ferment and spiritual unrest through which such a spirit as his must have gone- that searching and illuminating experience which is appointed to every great creative nature - his mind had moved uncertainly but inevitably toward the theatre as the sphere for the expression of the rich and passionate life steadily deepening and rising within him. The atmosphere and temper of his time, the growing spirit of nationality, the stories upon which his imagination had been fed from earliest childhood, the men whom he knew, the instinct and impulse of his own nature these things determined his career, and, far more insistently than any outward circumstance or happening, drew him to London.

His daughter Susannah was born in May, 1583; in February, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet and Judith, were baptized. He had assumed the gravest responsibilities, and there is no reason to doubt that he felt their full weight. Stratford offered him nothing which would have been anything more than drudgery to such a nature as his. To London, therefore, in 1586 he made his way in search of work and opportunity.

There were two well-established routes to London in that day of few, bad, and dangerous roads; one ran through Banbury and Aylesbury, and the other, which lay a little farther to the west and was a little longer, ran through Oxford and High Wycombe. The journey was made in the saddle or on foot; there were no other methods of travel. Goods of all kinds were carried by packhorses; wagons were very rude and very rare; it was fifty years later before vehicles began to run regularly as public conveyances. If Shakespeare, after the custom of the time, bought a horse for the occasion, he probably sold it, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps suggests, on reaching Smithfield, to James Burbage, who was a livery-man in that neighbourhood—the father of the famous actor Richard Burbage, with whom the poet was afterwards thrown in intimate relations. It was the custom among men of small means to buy horses for a journey, and sell them when the journey was accomplished. Tradition has long affirmed that Shakespeare habitually used the route which ran through Oxford and High Wycombe. The Crown Inn, which stood near Carfax, in Oxford, was the centre of many associations, real or imaginary,

with Shakespeare's journeys from the Capital to his home in New Place. The beautiful university city was even then venerable with years and thronged with students. Shakespeare's infinite wit and marvellous charm, to which there are many contemporary testimonies, made him later a welcome companion in one of the most brilliant groups of men in the history of literature. The spell of Oxford must have been upon him, and volumes of biography might well be exchanged for a brief account of one evening in the commons room of some college when the greatest and most companionable of English men of genius was the guest of scholars who shared with him the liberating power of the new age; for Shakespeare was loved by men of gentle breeding and of ripest culture.

Dickens once said that if he sat in a room five minutes, without consciously taking note of his surroundings, he found himself able, by the instinctive action of his mind, to describe the furnishing of the room to the smallest detail. This faculty of what may be called instinctive observation Shakespeare possessed in rare degree; he saw everything when he seemed to be seeing nothing. It is not impossible that, as Aubrey declares, "he happened to take the humour of the constable in Midsummer Night's Dream' in a little town near Oxford." There is no constable in Shakespeare's single fairy-play, and Aubrey was probably thinking of Dogberry or Verges. Shakespeare was constantly "taking the humour" of men and women wherever he found himself, and although Oxford is connected with his life only by a