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enough. His work was done, and he had tasted, nay, had drained, life's cup of bitter-sweet. Dugdale tells us that his monument was the work of Gerard Johnson, an eminent sculptor of the period; others have attributed it to Thomas Stanton; and experts have supposed that the face was modelled from a cast taken after death.

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Be this as it may, the bust must be accepted as the most authentic likeness that we have of Shakespeare. It was originally colored after life. The eyes were light hazel, the hair and beard auburn, the complexion fair; the doublet was scarlet; the tabard, or loose gown without sleeves thrown over the doublet, black; the neck and wristbands white; the upper side of the cushion green, the under, crimson; its cord and tassels, gilt. The colors were renewed in 1749; but in 1793 Malone, tastelessly and ignorantly classic, had the whole figure painted white by a house-painter. A flat stone covers the grave. Upon it is the following strange inscription:

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A Mr. Dowdall, in an existing letter to Mr. Edward Southwell, dated April 10th, 1692, says that these lines were written by the poet himself a little before his death. Dowdall plainly records a tradition which possibly may have been well founded. It is more probable, however, that to prevent the removal of Shakespeare's remains to the charnel house of the church, when time made other demands upon the space they occupied, in compliance with a custom of the day and place, some member of his family, or some friend, had this rude, hearty curse cut upon his tomb-stone. Tradition, not traceable

higher than 1693, says his wife and daughters earnestly desired to be laid in the same grave with him, but that "not one for fear of the curse above said dare touch his grave-stone." It has had one good effect, at least. It has kept at Stratford those relics which but for it would probably have been removed to Westminster Abbey. Susannah,

Shakespeare's wife and his two daughters married to Dr. Hall, and Judith, married to Thomas Quiney survived him. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, who also was living at the time of his death, was twice married; first, to Thomas Nash, an esquire of Stratford, and afterward to Mr. John Barnard of Abington in Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II. in 1661; but she had no children. Judith had three sons, who died unmarried; and with Lady Barnard, who died in 1669-70, Shakespeare's family became extinct. His property was strictly entailed upon the male issue of his daughter Susannah, which failed to appear. The entail was broken by legal contrivance; and soon after the death of Lady Barnard, the estate which he had gathered with so much labor and solicitude was dispersed. New Place, which was the home of his later years, was distinguished, in Lady Barnard's time, by the brief residence there of Queen Henrietta Maria, during the troubles of the Great Revolution. Mr. and Mrs. Nash entertained the Queen there for three weeks, in June, 1643, when, escorted by Prince Rupert and his troops, she was on her progress to join King Charles at Oxfordan incident which would have been well pleasing to Mistress Nash's grandfather. Afterward, as we have already seen, New Place fell into the hands of Sir Hugh Clopton, a descendant of its builder, who renovated and altered it; and it was finally bought by the Reverend Francis Gastrell as his residence. He lived there several years, much annoyed by curious pilgrims to his house and to

his garden, in which there was a mulberry tree, which, according to the tradition of the town, Shakespeare planted with his own hands. This Reverend gentleman was wealthy enough to indulge in that very expensive luxury, a high temper. So at last he gave his vexation vent by cutting down the mulberry tree,* and afterward, in 1759, having quarrelled with the magistrates about assessments, he razed his house to the ground, and left the place, a petty ecclesiastic Erostratus, hooted and execrated by the Stratford people. Thus, within less than one hundred and fifty years of his death, all trace of Shakespeare had disappeared from Stratford, except his birthplace and his tomb.

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This is all that we know by authentic record, by tradition, and by inference of him who stands alone in the highest niche of literary fame. But this is much. seems little only because of his greatness. Of many men not to be thought of in comparison with him, we know indeed much more, and in these days, when every man seems, like Pepys, to be his own Boswell, we are likely to know all; but of many who occupy a place only second to his, we know much less. The causes of our ignorance of Shakespeare's life are partly the Puritanism which developed itself in the mother country during his life, and the consequent political convulsions which came so soon after his death, and lasted so long; partly the frivolous and grovelling taste of the literary and dramatic school which came in with the Restoration, and prevailed for more than half a century, and which

* The wood of this tree was bought by a watchmaker of Stratford, who made it into boxes and similar articles. It must have attained an enormous size; for there is enough of it extant to make a line-of-battle ship. But my piece and yours, reader, are genuine.

cared little about the works and less about the life of William Shakespeare; partly, too, we may be sure, a desire on his part, characteristic of all cultivated people of English race, to keep personal affairs from publicity. But the effect of these causes is small in comparison with the results of the indifference which prevailed among people of all ages and countries, until within the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, to the personal character and private lives of poets, painters, scientific men, and generally of all public persons not concerned in government. We know more of Shakespeare than the Greeks knew of Eschylus, the father of their tragedy, or of Aristophanes, the father of their comedy, two centuries after they died. Public functions partially preserved the personal history of Sophocles from similar obscurity. Of Molière, the greatest and most original of French dramatic writers, there is almost equal ignorance; and it is remarkable that not a page of his manuscripts is known to be in existence. The personal history of Shakespeare's great contemporary Bacon is well known; but had he not become the king's Attorney General, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Vicount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England, Master Bacon might have written his Essays and worked out his Novum Organon in happy unobserved obscurity, and the world might have begun to inquire into his every-day life only after it had discovered that he was the greatest philosopher of modern times. Of Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen we are yet more ignorant than we are of him. Of Beaumont and Fletcher, both born in the rank of gentry, one the son of a Judge, the other of a Bishop, we know little more than that they wrote their plays and lived in the society of the most intelligent men of their day. Chapman's associations and what he did are discovered only

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