recompense the weaver and sempstress for their labours in our favour. With God's blessing added to our toils, we may presume upon having decent clothes. Another point in the argument is that the lilies are short-lived and devoted to a base purpose: "The grass of the field (with which the lilies are mixed up) which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven." The custom was to use up the stalky herbage for kindling where fuel was scarce. Many a beautiful flower went to the flames. Argument-If those flowers, fading so soon, and ruthlessly thrust into the oven to heat it, were clothed by God's own hand with habits so lovely, what may not we expect who bear the stamp of immortality and are destined to outlive the world? When our garments grow thread-bare, lose their gloss, and cast their fur, let us not fall hopeless, but think of flowery meads and beautified road sides, and have faith in God. . . . We halt now and draw to a close by recapitulating. Distracting care is unreasonable, considering that we have already had greater favours than those about which our fears are exercised; that the Almighty makes the inferior animals his care; that care is unavailing and useless; and that wild flowers have so much beauty bestowed on them, their frailty notwithstanding. Let us open our hearts to admit the force of the Saviour's arguments. Let us bid away from our breasts every distrustful thought and dark foreboding. Let it be our chief care to please God, and he will crown our board with needful food and replenish our exhausted wardrobe. Living upon this plan, and swayed by such considerations, we may pass our days as happy as children, as free from apprehension as a bird of the air, as void of care as the lily of the field. "O fear the Lord, ye his servants, for there is no want to them that fear him." T. G.

ART. III.-SHAKSPERE.

William Shakspere, a Biography. By Charles Knight. Routledge, and Co., London.

Shakespeare-Characters, chiefly those subordinate. By Charles Cowden Clarke. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1863.

Globe Edition of Shakspere's complete works. In one vol., edited by Revs. W. G. Clark, and W. Aldis Wright. Macmillan and Co., Cambridge and London, 1864.

ETWEEN the biographies of Shakspere by Dyce, Halliwell and Knight it is most difficult to choose. Each is painstaking, critical, discriminative, exhaustive and masterly. Yet we have made the selection indicated by placing Knight's work at the head of this article. Our preference is grounded mainly upon

the clear and satisfactory manner in which he grapples with many difficulties that turn up in the tracing of Shakspere's life.

The second work at the head of this writing is one of great value to all Shakspere readers. Mr. Clarke is second to none of the great dramatist's commentators in successfully expounding and illustrating his works. We know nothing in Shaksperian literature to compare with it, save the brilliant and powerfully written Shakspere papers of the late Dr. Maginn; there is no parade of learning, no adulating incense offered to the poet's memory, but an honest and philosophical setting forth of the scope, character and tendency of the poet's works.

We place the third work at the head of our paper and commend it for the following reasons:-It is cheap: here are the whole of Shakspere's works for three shillings and sixpence, a marvel in this age of marvels. Then we commend it because of the editing; from their long and intimate studies in every thing pertaining to Shaksperian literature as well as by their scholarly attainments, the editors are pre-eminently fitted for their work. We have here by their care, skill, and knowledge as near an approximation to a perfect text as we have had at all. There is, also, the valuable glossary prepared by the Rev. J. M. Jephson for this work; and the getting up" is superior; paper, type, and binding are excellent. For ordinary use we greatly prefer it to more costly editions.

66

That the name of Shakspere stands at the head of English literature is now generally acknowledged. It is not affirmed that there are none greater in the spheres of science, art, philosophy, or in some particular sphere in literature, such as the historian, novelist, or epic poet. But for equal and universal grasp of human nature, for giving utterance, in forms the most striking, true and perfect, to airy fancies and profoundest speculations and thinkings of the human mind; for bodying forth the struggles and most violent surgings of human passion, and laying bare the labyrinthian motions of conscience; for sympathy with the attributes of external things; for deep persuasive sensibility, for retention, reflection, and powers of poetic re-production,-for all this he stands unrivalled in the literature of the world. He "held the mirror up to nature" in a manner that none but himself has done. How he summons up and employs the great realities of the past, and the possibilities of the future, and the regions outside our observation or senses! With him mental truths have some visible type in the byplay of allegory, fable, or personification; traversing the imaginary regions of fairy land, and using elves in the air, spirits in the shade, and naiads in the wave.

Yet in all these wondrous creations you never see the magician's hand. The man Shakspere never appears; instead of seeing him you see only Hamlet, Coriolanus, Othello, Jacques, Polonius, or Sir

Andrew Aguecheek. In reading Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Burns, Byron, and even in those most impersonal poets, Wordsworth and Tennyson, you have the figure, or the imagined figure of the writer ever before you, but not so here; the man, the creator, the artiste is swallowed up in the glory of the work. One great marvel in this wondrous genius is its "many sidedness," and universality. He has been called William the Gentle, William the Cheerful, the Meditative, the Metaphysical, the Melancholy,but if epithets of the kind are allowed, seize the idea of the illimitable versatility of his genius and productions, and pronounce him to be,-what none but himself can be truly denominated,William the Universal.

The materials for constructing his biography are confessedly scanty. We know little of him more than we do of Aristotle. How is this accounted for? Many conjectures have been broached to account for this paucity of biographic materials. It has been supposed that two large chests of the poet's manuscripts were destroyed in the great fire of Warwick. They were in the possession of an ignorant baker there, who married a descendant of Shakspere, and who allowed them to lie scattered about as garret lumber, till they were all consumed in the terrible fire that desolated the old town of Warwick. Another conjecture is, that his surviving relations, being rabid Puritans, most cordially hated everything connected with the stage, and made a complete holocaust of all his papers they possessed. This, however, hardly agrees with the laudatory inscription placed under his bust by these very friends. Then it is affirmed that some unreasoning parliamentarians and sectaries, during the period of the Commonwealth, destroyed all the correspondence and papers of the poet as unholy things. That this is likely cannot be disputed, when we remember how the papers of poor Quarles were destroyed, yet in this case there is not a tittle of evidence that it was so. Scant as the materials are, we are not so badly off as the well known and hackneyed saying of Stevens would indicate. He says:-"All we know of Shakspere is; that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor and wrote plays and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried."

But let the reader appeal from the dictum of the commentator to the pages of Knight, Halliwell and Dyce, and he will see, notwithstanding the many breaks and unsettled questions, how full the materials are. Of course there are many moot points, turning up leading to discussion and difference in opinion. There is the apparently easy question of the spelling of the name. Is it Chacksper, Shakespeyre, Schakespere, Schakespeire, Schakespere, Shaxper, Shagspere, Shakespeer, Shakyspere, Shakspeare, Shakespere,

Shakespeare or Shakspere? Or is it one of eight or ten more variatons which we might cite? The dispute lies, however, with the last three methods of spelling. For the first an array of eminent names may be cited such as Johnson, Pope, Davies, Cowden Clarke and many others. But for the last there is the indisputable authority of Shakspere himself, and the entries in the legal documents concerning himself and family. In the entry of his own baptism and death; the baptism and death of his children, the name as given in the parish books is in the last method; and his own signature to his will is in this method. This evidence has led the best critics of these days to adopt the poet's own way of writing his name.

The name whatever its orthography, is a warlike one, and is significant when taken in connection with the fact that the lineal ancestors of the bard shook spears in the wars of the Roses. On the deadly and decisive field of Bosworth an ancestor of his used a spear to some good purpose in favour of the noble Richmond. Public documents and heraldic archives show how the victorious Henry rewarded the valiant Shaksperes for their important military services. One portion of the reward was a substantial one in the form of lands and tenements near to Warwick.

If Shakspere's lineage figure in martial scenes and on historic fields, his maternal ancestry was still more aristocratic. His mother was an Arden, a family of high repute and rank and of good estate in the county of Warwick. Henry VII. visited his subject John Arden, Esq., and was entertained with due ceremony and sumptuousness. He was high sheriff of the county, as were several of his descendants. Robert Arden, Shakspere's maternal grandfather, is described as "a gentleman of worship and landed proprietor." This gentleman was twice married; of his first wife we have little information beyond the fact that she was the mother of his seven daughters. The mother of the poet was the youngest. His second wife, a widow, does not appear to have cherished any great regard for her step-daughters. This youngest daughter, Mary, enjoyed the special regard of her father, and was, conjointly with her sister Alice, the executrix of his will. By this will she got a considerable amount of property-sixty acres of arable and pasture land, a house called the Asbies, besides which she got the standing crops and a sum of money. We would fain know what manner of woman this Mary Arden was. Oldeys describes her as a woman of beauty and many personal charms, which we would gladly believe, as there is nothing to the contrary. To this Warwickshire lady, John Shakspere, a substantial yeoman and worthy burgess of Stratford town, began to pay his court, and in due time, that is about Christmas, 1557, they became man and wife in the Aston Cauntlow parish church. We have called John Shakspere a yeoman, but we do not forget the endless dispute as to

his vocation. This much, however, may be safely affirmed, that whatever else he was, or was not, his cultivation of freehold and other land, warrants us in calling him a yeoman. Rowe says he was a woolstapler. This arose, doubtless, from the market uses he made of the wool from his own sheep. Aubrey's ground for saying that he was a butcher is similar, for farmers and graziers in those days slew their own cattle and sheep, and sold the carcases themselves. The authority for calling him a glover is even slighter than this. Malone says that he is described in a legal document of the period as a glover; but palæographers who have carefully examined the bailiff's book, are by no means agreed with Malone's deciphering of the word. His calling therefore remains an open question. Though it is clear he had been settled in Stratford for some years, yet, singular to say, the first public notice we have of his residence in the good old town, is a record of legal proceedings against him for the infraction of the sanitary laws of the town. This was in April, 1552. The offence must have been common, if we may judge from the number of fines imposed. Six years after this we find him sinning in the same way, for he, with others, was mulcted in "fourpence," for not keeping his gutters clean. He was a man of note in the town, these proceedings notwithstanding. His appointment to several civic offices shows the esteem and respect he had won, and shows also that he must have been a capable, trustworthy man of business. He was several times corporation actuary, was elected alderman in 1565, and three years. subsequently became the worshipful the High Bailiff-chief magistrate," Mr.," magister, which title, "Master," he afterwards bore. Yet it appears that, notwithstanding Mary Shakspere's gentle blood and John's business capabilities and civic position, neither of them could write. Charles Knight, in his ably written biography, "thinks" they could; but against the kindly thought of the industrious biographer stands the damaging fact that the humble device of the mark is resorted to instead of the signature, and in the list of the seven clerks of corporation who sign their names, John Shakspere's name is conspicuous by its absence.

The children of this Stratford alderman were eight in number. The eldest, Joan, died in infancy; the second, Margaret, also died an infant; the third is the one who has made his name, his family, and birthplace, famous for ever; the fourth, Gilbert, was living in Stratford in 1609; the fifth, Joan, was born in 1569, and died 1646; the sixth, Anne, died when eight years old; Richard, the seventh, was born in 1574, and died in Stratford in 1613; the last, Edmund, who became an actor, was born in 1580, died in London at the age of twenty-seven. Rowe affirms that the number of this family was ten; but this error arose from confounding with our John Shakspere another of the same name in the town, a shoemaker,