demon to claim performance of the dread contract,in these, and in a rich glow of classic imagery, and in the appropriate colouring of gloom and horror thrown over the whole action, we must be pardoned if we think our countryman superior. The Jew of Malta' is the portraiture of revenge and hatred embodied in the common type of the Jewish character as it appeared to the popular imagination of the sixteenth century; that is, under a form at once terrific, odious, and contemptible. Not among the least astonishing proofs of Shakspeare's divine and prescient mind is the fact that, living at a period when the Jews were still persecuted, and when popular prejudice—that indestructible monster still believed the calumnies of the Middle Ages, and fancied that the Jews sacrificed a Christian child at the Passover, and practised the forbidden arts of magic and necromancy, that Shakspeare should have been victorious over the prejudices which still enchained the mind even of the learned Marlow, and should have given us, in Shylock, the portrait, the living image, of "an Israelite indeed," not the absurd bugbear of the Elizabethan stage, with his red nose, his impossible riches, and equally impossible crimes, but a real breathing man, desperately cruel and revengeful it is true, but cruel and revengeful on what seem to him good grounds, and only so far a Jew as not the less to remain a human being like ourselves. Nothing can surpass the absurdity of Marlow's plot in this play—an absurdity hardly compensated by occasional passages of majestic though somewhat tumid declamation. Few things, for instance, can be finer than the dying speech of Barabas, the Jew

"Die life, fly soul, tongue curse thy fill, and die!”

or his comparison of himself to the ominous and obscene bird

"The sad-presaging raven, that tolls

The sick man's passport from her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night

Doth shake contagion from her sable wings."

Marlow's life was as wild and irregular as his genius, and his death at once tragic and deplorable. It is related that in an unworthy brawl, in a place and with a person (according to some accounts a serving-man) as disreputable as the occasion, he endea voured to use his dagger on the person of his antagonist, who, seizing Marlow's wrist, gave a different direction to the poniard; the weapon entered Marlow's own head, "in such sort," to use the words of Anthony Wood, "that, notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be brought, he shortly after died of his wound."

He was buried at Deptford on the 1st of June, 1593; and many dramas have come down to us bearing the impress of his genius, and several, indeed, ascribed to his name: but such was the prevalence of his style when he wrote, and so universal at this period was the custom for several dramatists to work together or successively at the

same piece, that it is very difficult to affiliate with certainty the dramas of the Elizabethan age, except those of Shakspeare.

The finest, perhaps, of these works is the Edward II.,' which contains many passages of deepest pathos. As a proof of the high reputation enjoyed by Marlow among his contemporaries, we will quote the spirited lines of Drayton

"Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his verses were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness he did still retain

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.”

In taking our leave of this great and brilliant genius, we cannot but regret that his untimely death deprived his works of the regularity which time and experience would probably have given to them; and whether we speak of him as a man or as an author, we may very well apply to him the lines pronounced in his own tragedy by the scholar over the mangled limbs of Faustus:

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight;

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,

That sometime grew within this learned man.'

There is a great deal of melancholy truth in that profound verse of the modern poet,

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men:"

and this verity will especially apply to that class of which we would desire the most minute details-the Poets. Of Homer we know so little that his very existence and personality have been brought in question; respecting Virgil we possess only a few vague and cold notices; of the private life, and, above all, the intellectual life, of Milton, we possess no information but what we can glean from his writings; and of a greater yet than these-Shakspeare-all the details which we possess may be condensed into a few lines, and are principally derived from the most frigid and unattractive of all sources, legal documents, the poet's will holding among these the most forward place.

William Shakspeare or Shakespeare was born, as everybody knows, in the little town of Stratford, on the Avon, in Warwickshire, in the month of April, 1564. He was baptized on the 26th, which has originated the poetical, and certainly not very improbable tradition, that the greatest of Englishmen was born on the 23rd of April, the anniversary of St. George, the tutelary saint of his country. His father was a dealer in wool (not a butcher, as was long ignorantly supposed), and had at one time been in flourishing circumstances, for he had occupied the office of high-bailiff, or chief municipal dignitary, in his native town, but he appears, notwithstanding his having married an heiress possessed of some little fortune, to have gradually

sunk into great distress, and ultimately to have received charity from the corporation of which he had once been a prominent member. "Genius," as Washington Irving prettily says, "delights to nestle its offspring in strange places;" and it is a proud distinction of England that its literature should number among its brightest names so large a proportion of men born in the humblest ranks of society. It is beneath low roofs, and few are humbler than that venerable one at Stratford, that the cradles of our greatest men were rocked; it is by poor firesides that their genius budded and expanded; and this is the reason why our literature, more than that of any other country, echoes the universal sentiments of the human heart, and speaks a language intelligible to every country and every age.

Of Shakspeare's childhood and education nothing is accurately known; perhaps the poverty of his father, by preventing him giving his son more than very limited and rustic instruction, enabled the boy's intellect to develop itself naturally and gradually, unstiffened and uncrippled by the too early discipline of a schoolmaster— that discipline which, like the swathing and swaddling-bands of the inju dicious nurse, so often cripples and deforms what it is intended to render strong and beautiful. His early years were probably passed amid the smiling scenery surrounding Stratford, marking, with prophetic eye, every tint of cloud and stream, every feature of external beauty, and laying up a store of observations on the passions, the sentiments, and the oddities of human character,—

"While he was yet a boy,

Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency

Of natural objects then led on to feel

For passions that were not his own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)

On man, the heart of man, and human life."

There can be little doubt of Shakspeare having at some early period of his life been employed as clerk to some country attorney ; for he shows in all his works a technical acquaintance with the phraseology of the English lawan acquaintance, indeed, which could only have been acquired by actual practice: this circumstance is also further proved by some of the few passages in the writings of his contemporaries in which mention is made of the great dramatist. His life at Stratford, according to the vague and imperfect traditions subsisting after his death in his native place, was idle, and perhaps even riotous careful investigation has shown the impossibility of the events assigned by the well-known anecdote of the deerstealing in Sir Thomas Lucy's park at Charlecote, as the immediate cause of his quitting Stratford and first adventuring in the career of London life. However reluctant we may be, in our eagerness tc know the details of such a life, we must resign this picturesque story of the youthful Shakspeare's woodland misdemeanour, and

seek for some other cause of his leaving Warwickshire. This is to be found in the register of the poet's marriage with Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a small farmer residing at Shottery, a village about a mile from Stratford. On the 28th of November, 1582, Shakspeare obtained at Worcester a licence of marriage, permitting the ceremony to take place with once asking of the banns, a circumstance which shows that this important act of life was accompanied with great hurry and precipitation, the more obviously so as Shakspeare was at this time a minor, and consequently unable to enter legally into any contract for himself. In this document, therefore, we find the names of two persons as sureties for the bridegroom, who was, it must be observed, seven years younger than his wife. All this precipitation, however, is explained by the register of baptisms in the church of Stratford, by which it appears that the poet's daughter Susanna was christened on the 26th of May, 1583, or only six months after the marriage. In a year and a half two other children, twins, were born to the poet, who had no offspring afterwards. Finding himself thus, at the early age of nineteen, a husband and a father, and probably perceiving that the obscurity of a retired village was no sphere for his intellectual powers, our poet about this time betook himself to London, there to commence his brief career of glory. Educated so imperfectly as he must have been, it is only to solitary and intense, though perhaps desultory study, that he could have owed that extensive acquaintance with books which he undoubtedly possessed; and it is therefore fair to conclude that he had been a diligent reader before he left his native place. In the employment of classical images, for example, Shakspeare shows no inferiority to any of that great number of dramatists at this period who were men of academical education; many of them indeed men of distinguished learning. His writings abound in passages indicating a very extensive and accurate acquaintance with classical imagery, and at the same time his splendid imagination has imparted to such allusions a vivacity, a brilliancy, and a glory not to be found in any other author. Much controversy has been raised with respect to Shakspeare's scholarship, and minute and ingenious investigation has been employed not only to determine how far he was acquainted with the literature of Greece and Rome, with the 'Italian, Spanish, and French languages, but even to ascertain what books he had read; and while some have considered his acquirements as unusually great, others have thought to exalt his glory by denying him even moderate share of learning. The truth is, however, probably between these two extremes; and when we reflect that many of the great authors of antiquity, with whose thoughts he was evidently familiar, were translated, when he wrote, into English, we may be justified in considering him to have had a tolerable acquaintance with Latin and French, two languages which enter largely (though

in a comparatively impure state) into the legal phraseology of England.

Plutarch, for example, had been translated into English, and Chap man's grand version of Homer had doubtless rolled its majestic har monies over the ear of Shakspeare: this was enough for such a mind, whose assimilative power was so immense. With such intellects the slightest hint is sufficient: from the mere ruins and imperfect fragments of the Beautiful, they can build up a perfect and complete edifice, even as the eye of Cuvier, from a tooth, from a fragment of bone of some antediluvian reptile, could reconstruct the whole system of animal life which had passed away for ever. Of all the attempts

in modern literature to reproduce the manners and sentiments of the classical periods, Shakspeare's are by far the most successful: we need only refer to the characters of Coriolanus, of Cleopatra, of Cæsar, of Ulysses; while in the employment of classical imagery no poet has ever exhibited such mastery and grace.

Shakspeare's first introduction to London life and to the theatrical profession has been as much misrepresented by tradition as the cause of his leaving his native town. The legend goes, that the poet, on his first arrival in the metropolis, was reduced to such distress as to hold horses at the door of the theatres, and that he thus ultimately obtained bis introduction "behind the scenes." This, however, like the story of the deer-stealing, is a tale totally without foundation. We have seen in a former chapter that the companies of actors were occasionally in the habit of going about the country, and performing at the houses of the nobility: it was very possible for Shakspeare to have gratified that youthful desire which so many of us have felt for a peep into the enchanted world of the stage, long before he even thought of going to seek his fortune in London. This is the more probable as Thomas Green, an actor of note at the time, was a native of Stratford, and, some have supposed, a kinsman of the poet; and Richard Burbage, the greatest tragedian of the day, and perhaps one of the greatest actors hom England ever produced, was a Warwickshire man. We know also that the actors were frequently in the habit of visiting Stratford, and the probability is, that it was by Green's invitation that Shakspeare first joined a troop of players. That he was possessed of poetical genius could not have been unknown even at this time, as it is difficult to believe that his first works-the Venus and Adonis' and the 'Lucrece'-were not composed during his residence at Stratford. These two works, though disfigured by that Italian taste which was prevalent at the time, and though containing passages of a somewhat too warm complexion for the stricter taste of the present day, are full of the softest harmony and the most luxuriant imagery: the youthful fancy of the poet seems to run riot in the richest profusion: these works bear all the marks, and exhibit all the defects, of youth-but it is of the youth of a Shakspeare.