SHAKSPEARE'S MEMORIES. 127 sion of startling and unprecedented events, more splendid and often more terrible than anything he could tell from history or fable. He saw, in his youth, the dreadful drama of the beautiful Mary of Scotland, her errors, crimes, and tragic fate, sadder than any he has painted; he felt the terror that fell upon England when the Armada was approaching, and the wild exultation that followed its utter defeat; he must have shared with Essex, Southampton, and Raleigh in the brilliant schemes of colonization and discovery. Soon came the dark days when Essex and Southampton, impetuous conspirators, rode out to seize the queen. Then Essex was beheaded, Southampton thrown into the Tower, and Shakspeare mourned over his friends. The queen died in anguish. Her successor favored the poet; Southampton was released; and for ten years the theatre shone with the wonderful pieces, tragic or comic, in which Shakspeare founded his own untutored school of dramatic art. His last play, it is said, was Twelfth Night. He was a rich man. He had bought a house in Blackfriars, and owned the finest house in Stratford. Every year he had probably visited his native place, his wife and children (whom he had raised to affluence), his father, relatives, or friends; but nothing is known of his domestic life. It is supposed that his family may have joined him in London; it is certain that he came to them at last at Stratford. At Stratford. The last stage of life was drawing on, but Shakspeare was never destined to reach the "lean and slippered pantaloon." About 1513 he probably left London for Stratford. If in his youth he had ever entertained any visions of fame, affluence, the favor of nobles and princes, they had been more than fulfilled. Of his reputation with all coming generations he seemed careless, unconscious. He had left Stratford a poor, unlearned rustic; he came back renowned, polished, wealthy, the friend of king and people. But, what is still remarkable, in his native place he seems to have forgotten letters, the drama, the stage, and given himself chiefly to buying land, building, improving, and the quiet course of village life. His daughter Susanna had married Dr. Hall, and Shakspeare was a grandfather at thirty-eight. Judith, his younger daughter, was also married. The poet lived in ease, affluence, and high esteem, even though he had been a player; but he seems to have yielded to the Puritanical feeling SHAKSPEARE'S PAPERS. 129 of his daughters or his age, and forgot that he was famous. His Papers Lost. -It does not appear that Shakspeare passed any portion of the few years that remained to him in literary composition, or ever took any part in preparing his works for publication. He left no manuscripts. None of the originals of his plays have been preserved, not even a sonnet or a letter. He had no correspondents, or, if he had any, they destroyed his letters and he theirs. The most extraordinary oblivion has fallen upon all the literary labors of this greatest of authors. Not a page of his voluminous writings has been preserved. A mystery hangs over their loss. Shakspeare is, indeed, all mystery. He flung aside his pen, and returned once more almost to the plough. His Death. The house is shown at Stratford in which Shakspeare was born. It is small, low, but the houses of the sixteenth century were usually plain and rude. He died somewhat suddenly and prematurely, it would seem, in his fine mansion in New Place, on his birthday, April 23d, 1616, in his fifty-second year.* Yet in these active ages * Mr. Halliwell, The New Place, London, 1864, sug men married young, lived laborious lives, and seldom reached fifty years of age. Sidney, Spenser, Surrey, Southampton, Essex, and many another great name perished early. Like shadows they had dissolved before Shakspeare's eyes, and he had sung their requiems in many a hidden allusion. And now all the poets sung his, for he was generally loved. Shakspeare's Will.-His will is the only one of Shakspeare's compositions of which we have the manuscript. It is remarkable that it makes no mention of his plays or poems, his fame, or his destiny. No one would suppose that it was composed under the direction of the first of poets, of him whose genial influence was to penetrate to every land, and awaken the poetical instincts of all future ages. It is a prosaic, a complicated, and apparently inequitable will, in which he gives the greater part of his property to his elder daughter, Mrs. Hall (Susan gests that the bad air, the imperfect drainage at Stratford, may have produced a malaria-a typhoid feverthat carried off the poet. His house at New Place was a large one, but old. Tradition relates that he was obliged to spend large sums in refitting it. The English villages were often beautiful, picturesque—at a distance. SHAKSPEARE'S WILL. 131 na); to his wife a poor bequest; and to his younger daughter, Judith, a few hundred pounds. It is evidently the will of a Protestant, apparently a Puritan. It enumerates his possessions with minuteness; it is complicated and obscure. To Susanna Hall he gives his house in New Place, his barns, orchards, gardens, lands; to Judith he gives a silver-gilt bowl; and all the rest of his furniture to Dr. Hall and Susanna; to his wife he gives his "second best bed with the furniture." Yet it is evident that his wife, who survived until 1629, was already well provided for, that she lived in ease, and was never neglected by her husband. The signature to the will is almost illegible. Order of the Plays.-Of the thirty-five plays attributed to Shakspeare, some he merely softened and amended, some he may have composed in part, many are evidently from his practised hand alone. Yet I believe no definite canon has been reached by Shakspearian scholars as to the authorship of several of them, the more rigid rejecting much that others will scarcely spare. The trilogy of Henry VI. is still doubtful. It is supposed that among the earliest of his plays, written in the fresh impulses of his youth, were Love's Labor's Lost, the Comedy |