sharpness of conceit, with what lively delight this might pierce into the hearers' hearts, I pray ye imagine yourself as ye may." If Elizabeth be the "fair vestal throned by the west," of which there can be no reasonable doubt, the most appropriate scene of the mermaid's song would be Kenilworth, and "that very time" the summer of 1575.

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Percy, believing that the boy Shakspere was at Kenilworth, has remarked, with his usual taste and judgment, that "the dramatic cast of many parts of that superb entertainment must have had a very great effect upon a young imagination, whose dramatic powers were hereafter to astonish the world." Without assuming with Percy that our young bard gained admittance into the castle on the evening when % after supper was there a play of a very good theme presented; but so set forth, by the actors' well handling, that pleasure and mirth made it seem very short, though it lasted two good hours and more;' ;"a yielding not our consent to Tieck's fiction, that the boy performed the part of "Echo in Gascoigne's address to the Queen, and was allowed to see the whole of the performances by the especial favour of her Majesty, we may believe there were parts of that entertainment, which, without being a favoured spectator, William Shakspere with his friends might have beheld; and which "must have had a very great effect upon a young imagination," assisting, too, in giving it that dramatic tendency, which was a peculiar characteristic of the simplest and the commonest festivals of his age.

And yet it is difficult to imagine anything more tedious than the fulsome praise, the mythological pedantries, the obscure allusions to Constancy and Deep-Desire, which were poured into the ears of Elizabeth during the nineteen days of Kenilworth. There was not, according to the historians of this visit, one fragment of our real old poetry produced, to gratify the Queen of a nation that had the songs and ballads of the chivalrous times still fresh upon its lips. There were no Minstrels at Kenilworth; the Harper was unbidden to its halls. The old English spirit of poetry was dead in a scheming court. It was something higher that in

a Laneham.

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a few years called up Spenser and Shakspere. Yet there was one sport, emanating from the people, which had heart and reality in it. Laneham describes this as a "good sport presented in an historical cue by certain good-hearted men of Coventry, my lord's neighbours there." The description by Laneham is the only precise account which remains to us of the "old storial show." It was a show not to be despised; for it told the people how their Saxon ancestors had arisen to free themselves from "outrage and unsupportable insolency," and "how valiantly our Englishwomen, for love of their country, behaved themselves." It is difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than that of Percy, that the play, as originally performed by the men of Coventry, "expressed in action and rhymes after their manner,"—representing a complicated historical event,--the insolence of tyranny, the indignation of the oppressed, the grievous complaint of one injured chieftain, the secret counsels, the plots, the conflicts, the triumph,—must have offered us a regular model of a complete drama." If the young Shakspere were a witness to the performance of this drama, his imagination would have been more highly and more worthily excited than if he had been the favoured spectator of all the shows of Tritons, and Dianas, and Ladies of the Lake that proceeded from "the conceit so deep in casting the plot" of his lordship of Leicester. It would be not too much to believe that this storial show might first suggest to him how English history might be dramatised; how a series of events, termininating in some remarkable catastrophe, might be presented to the eye; how fighting-men might be marshalled on a mimic field; how individual heroism might stand out from amongst the mass, having its own fit expression of thought and passion; how the wife or the mother, the sister or the mistress, might be there to uphold the hero, even as the Englishwomen assisted their warriors; and how all this might be made to move the hearts of the people, as the old ballads had once moved them. Such a result would have repaid a visit to Kenilworth by William Shakspere. Without this, he, his father, and their friends, might have retired from the scene of Dudley's magnificence, as most thinking persons in all probability retired, with little satisfaction

There was lavish expense; but, according to the most credible accounts, the possessor of Kenilworth was the oppressor of his district. We see him not delighting to show his Queen a happy tenantry, such as the less haughty and ambitious nobles and esquires were anxious to cultivate. The people came under the windows of Elizabeth as objects of ridicule. Slavish homage would be there to Leicester from the gentlemen of the county. They would replenish his butteries with their gifts; they would ride upon his errands; they would wear his livery. There was one gentleman in Warwickshire who would not thus do Leicester homage-Edward Arden, the head of the great house of Arden, the cousin of William Shakspere's mother. But the mighty favourite was too powerful for him: "Which Edward, though a gentleman not inferior to the rest of his ancestors in those virtues wherewith they were adorned, had the hard hap to come to an untimely death in 27 Eliz., the charge laid against him being no less than high treason against the Queen, as privy to some foul intentions that Master Somerville, his son-in-law (a Roman Catholic), had towards her person: For which he was prosecuted with so great rigour and violence, by the Earl of Leicester's means, whom he had irritated in some particulars (as I have credibly heard), partly in disdaining to wear his livery, which many in this county, of his rank, thought, in those days, no small honour to them; but chiefly for galling him by certain harsh expressions, touching his private accesses to the Countess of Essex before she was his wife; that through the testimony of one Hall, a priest, he was found guilty of the fact, and lost his life in Smithfield." a The late Rev. N. J. Halpin, who has contributed a most interesting tract to the publications of 'The Shakspere Society' on the subject of 'Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer Night's Dream,' has explained the allusions in that exquisite passage with far more success than the belief of Warburton that the Queen of Scots was pointed at, or of Mr. Boaden that Amy Robsart was the "little western flower." He considers that Edward Arden, a spectator of those very entertainments at Kenil

a Dugdale's Warwickshire,' p. 681.

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saw,

worth, discovered Leicester's guilty "accesses to the Countess of Essex;" that the expression of Oberon, "That very time, I but thou couldst not," referred to this discovery; that when "the Imperial Votaress passed on," he "marked where the bolt of Cupid fell;" that "the little western flower," pure, "milk-white before that time, became spotted, purple with love's wound." We may add that there is bitter satire in what follows—" that flower," retaining the original influence, "will make or man or woman madly dote," as Lettice, Countess of Essex, was infatuated by Leicester. The discovery of Edward Arden, and his “harsh cxpressions" concerning it, might be traditions in Shakspere's family, and be safely allegorised by the poet in 1594, when Leicester was gone to his account.

CHAPTER III.

THE first who attempted to write 'Some Account of the Life of William Shakspeare,' Rowe, says, "His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment. He had bred him, it is true, for some time at a free-school, where, it is probable, he acquired what Latin he was master of: but the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home, forced his father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily prevented his further proficiency in that language." This statement, be it remembered, was written one hundred and thirty years after the event which it professes to record -the early removal of William Shakspere from the freeschool to which he had been sent by his father. It is manifestly based upon two assumptions, both of which are incorrect :-The first, that his father had a large family of ten children, and was so narrowed in his circumstances that he could not spare even the time of his eldest son, he being taught for nothing; and, secondly, that the son, by his early removal from the school where he acquired "what Latin he was master of," was prevented attaining "a proficiency in that language," his works manifesting "an igno

rance of the ancients." Mr. Halliwell, commenting upon this statement, says, "John Shakspeare's circumstances began to fail him when William was about fourteen, and he then withdrew him from the grammar-school, for the purpose of obtaining his assistance in his agricultural pursuits.” Was fourteen an unusually early age for a boy to be removed from a grammar-school? We think not, at a period when there were boy-bachelors at the Universities. If he had been taken from the school three years before, when he was eleven,―certainly an early age,—we should have seen his father then recorded, in 1575, as the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street, and the "narrowness of his circumstances," as the reason of Shakspere's "no better proficiency," would have been at once exploded. In his material allegation Rowe utterly fails.

Anne

The family of John Shakspere did not consist of ten children. In the year 1578, when the school education of William may be reasonably supposed to have terminated, and before which period his "assistance at home" would rather have been embarrassing than useful to his father, the family consisted of five children: William, aged fourteen; Gilbert, twelve; Joan, nine; Anne, seven; and Richard, four. died early in the following year; and in 1580, Edmund, the youngest child, was born; so that the family never exceeded five living at the same time. But still the circumstances of John Shakspere, even with five children, might have been straitened. The assertion of Rowe excited the persevering diligence of Malone; and he collected together a series of documents from which he infers, or leaves the reader to infer, that John Shakspere and his family gradually sank from their station of respectability at Stratford into the depths of poverty and ruin. The sixth section of Malone's posthumous 'Life' is devoted to a consideration of this subject. It thus commences: "The manufacture of gloves, which was, at this period, a very flourishing one, both at Stratford and Worcester (in which latter city it is still carried on with great success), however generally beneficial, should seem, from whatever cause, to have afforded our poet's father but a scanty maintenance." We have endeavoured to show to what extent, and in what manner, John Shakspere