by indirect collateral evidence; but eminent as he was, and highly esteemed as he appears to have been, nothing is recorded of his personal history. We are obliged to infer the year of his birth from the record of his age upon his portrait; and time has left us no guide-post to his birthplace. The minor stars of the Elizabethan galaxy, the Greenes, Peeles, Marlowes, Websters, Fords, and such like, left hardly a trace behind them which their own pens had not written. Ben Jonson, who lived to see all the poets of the Elizabethan period in their graves, and to be an object of literary and almost antiquarian interest to a new generation and a new school, left more materials for his memoirs than any contemporary poet. But it is only with his later years that we are thus acquainted. Of his youth and early manhood we are not less ignorant than we are of Shakespeare's. Unlike Dante, unlike Milton, unlike Goethe, unlike the great poets and tragedians of Greece and Rome, Shakespeare left no trace upon the political, or even the social life of his era. Of his eminent countrymen Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wotton, and Donne, may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries; and yet there is no evidence whatever that he was personally known to either of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers, and artists of his day, except the few of his fellow-craftsmen whose acquaintance with him has been heretofore mentioned in these Memoirs. Shakespeare's character, entirely free from those irregularities which are usually, but unreasonably, regarded as almost the necessary concomitants of genius, seems to have been of singular completeness and of perfect bal ance. Of his transcendent mental gifts, the results of the daily labor by which he first earned his bread and then made his fortune remain as evidence; and what else we know of him shows him to us, in the common business and intercourse of life, upright, prudent, self-respecting; a man to be respected and relied upon. An actor at a time when actors were held in the lowest possible esteem, he won the kind regard and consideration of those who held high rank and station : a poet, he was not only thrifty but provident. Though careful of his own, he was not only just, but generous, to others. His integrity was early noticed; and Jonson says he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." Surpassing all his rivals, after the recoil of the first surprise he was loved by all except the meanest souls among them; and such men only love themselves. 'Sweet' and 'gentle are the endearing epithets which they delighted to apply to him. In his position, to have produced this effect upon high and low, he must have united a native dignity to a singular kindness of heart, evenness of temper, and graciousness of manner. His ready wit and his cheerfulness in social intercourse are particularly mentioned in tradition. To these qualities it is plain that he added a sympathy that was universal a gift which more than any other wins the love of all mankind. And, indeed, it is to the effect of this moral quality that we owe the complete and multitudinous manifestation of his intellectual greatness. The Reverend Mr. Davies, writing after 1688, says that "he died a papist." If he became a member of the Church of Rome, it must have been after he wrote Romeo and Juliet, in which he speaks of "evening mass;" for the humblest member of that church knows that there is no mass at vespers. The expression used by Davies implies, indeed, that Shakespeare died in a faith in which he had not been educated. But his report is improbable. In the overmuch righteousness of the puritanical period in which Shakespeare's last years were passed, a moderate degree of cheerfulness and Christian charity, to say nothing of conformity to the Church of England, might easily have brought the reproach of papistry upon men less open to suspicion than a retired player. Shakespeare, although he seems to have been a man of sincere piety, seems also to have been without religious convictions. His works are imbued with a high and heartfelt appreciation of the vital truths of Christianity; but nowhere does he show a leaning towards any form of religious observance, or of church government, or toward any theological tenet or dogma. No church can claim him; no simple Christian soul but can claim his fellowship. Such, as this imperfect record shows, was William Shakespeare; a man who adorned an inferior and dignified an equivocal station in life, and who raised himself from poverty and obscurity to competence and honorable position by labors which, having their motive not in desire of fame, but in duty and in manly independence, have placed him upon an enduring eminence to which in after ages sane ambition does not aspire. SHAKESPEARE'S WILL.* Vicesimo quinto die Martii,t Anno Regni Domini nostri Jacobi nunc Regis Angliæ, &c. decimo quarto, et Scotia xlixo. T. W Shackspeare IN the name of god, Amen! I William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon, in the countie of warr. gent, in *The will is on three sheets of paper, fastened together at the top. The poet's name is signed at the bottom of the first and of the + Originally written, "Januarii." Originally, "sonne and daughter." |