tions it runs thus: Obiit Anno Domini 1616. Etatis 53, die 23 Aprilis.' And this, in truth, is the only piece of evidence upon the point." Mr. Bolton Corney thus somewhat triumphantly meets this interpretation "The inscription contains no evidence in favour of the assumed birthday. It refutes the assertion sans réplique! As Shakspere died on the 23 April, in his fifty-third year, he must have been born before the 23 April, 1564." Oldys (who died in 1761), in his manuscript annotations upon Langbaine's 'Account of the English Dramatic Poets' (a book now to be seen in the Library of the British Museum), has an interpretation upon the inscription on the monument which he finds in Langbaine. Mr. Bolton Corney thus disposes of the worthy antiquary's theory: "Oldys, in some non-lucid moment, underscores die 23 Apr.subtracts 53 from 1616-and writes down 1563. He assumes that the words anno ætatis 53 are equivalent to vixit annos 53, and that the words die 23 Aprilis refer to anno ætatis, instead of being the object of Obiit. Such is the process, never before described, by which the birthday of Shakspere was discovered!"

We turn back to the first year of the egistry, 1558, for other records of John Shakspere's family; and we find the baptism of Joan, daughter to John Shakspere, on the 15th of September. Again, in 1562, on the 2nd of December, Margaret, daughter to John Shakspere, is baptized. In the entry of burials in 1563 we find, under date of April 30, that Margaret closed a short life in five months. The elder daughter Joan also died young. We look forward, and in 1566 find the birth of another son registered:-Gilbert, son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 13th of October of that year. In 1569 there is the registry of the baptism of a daughter, Joan, daughter of John Shakspere, on the 15th of April. Thus, the registry of a second Joan leaves no reasonable doubt that the first died, and that a favourite name was preserved in the family. In 1571 Anne is baptized; she died in 1579. In 1573-4 another son was baptized-Richard, son of Master (Magister) John Shakspere, on the 11th of March. The last entry, which determines the extent of John Shakspere's family, is that of Edmund, son of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 3rd of May, 1580. Here, then, we find that two sisters of William were removed by death, probably before his birth. In two years and a half another son, Gilbert, came to be his playmate; and when he was five years old that most precious gift to a loving boy was granted, a sister, who grew up with him. When he was ten years old he had another brother to lead by the hand into the green meadows. Then came another sister, who faded untimely; and when he was grown into youthful strength, a boy of sixteen, his youngest brother was born. William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, Edmund, constituted the whole of the family amongst whom John Shakspere was to share his means of existence. Rowe, we have already seen, mentions the large family of John Shakspere, "ten children in all." Malone has established very satisfactorily the origin of this error into which Rowe has fallen. In later years there was another John Shakspere in Stratford. In the books of the corporation the name of John Shakspere, shoemaker, can be traced in 1580; in the register in 1584 we find him married to Margery Roberts,

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who dies in 1587; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589. 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569-" Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597, which we shall e hereafter, it is set forth that John Shakspere and his wife Mary, in the

20th Elizabeth, 1577, mortgaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, without the honourable addition of Master, were also her children; for in 1599, when William Shakspere is an opulent man, application is made to the College of Arms, that John Shakspere, and his issue and posterity, might use a "shield of arms," impaled with the arms of Shakspere and Arden. This application (which appears also to have been made in 1596, as the grant of arms by Dethick states the fact of John Shakspere's marriage) would in all probability have been at the instance of John Shakspere's eldest son and heir. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reasonably be expected.

William Shakspere has been carried to the baptismal font in that fine old church of Stratford. The "thick-pleached alley" that leads through the churchyard to the porch is putting forth its buds and leaves. The chestnut hangs its white blossoms over the grassy mounds of that resting-place. All is joyous in the spring sunshine.

It is supposed that such a green avenue was an old appendage to the church, the present trees having taken the place of more ancient ones.

Kind neighbours are smiling upon the happy father; maidens and matrons snatch a kiss of the sleeping boy. There is "a spirit of life in everything" on this 26th of April, 1564. Summer comes, but it brings not joy to Stratford. There is wailing in her streets and woe in her houses. The death-register tells a fearful history. From the 30th June to the 31st December, two hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants, a sixth of the population, are carried to the grave. The plague is in the fated town; the doors are marked with the red cross, and the terrible inscription, "Lord, have mercy upon us." It is the same epidemic which ravaged Europe in that year; which in the previous year had desolated London, and still continued there; of which sad time Stow pithily says "The poor citizens of London were this year plagued with a threefold plague, pestilence, scarcity of money, and dearth of victuals; the misery whereof were too long here to write: no doubt the poor remember it; the rich by flight into the countries made shift for themselves." Scarcity of money and dearth of victuals are the harbingers and the ministers of pestilence. Despair gathers up itself to die. Labour goes not forth to its accustomed duties. Shops are closed. The market-cross hears no hum of trade. The harvest lies almost ungathered in the fields. At last the destroying angel has gone on his way. The labourers are thinned; there is more demand for labour; "victuals" are not more abundant, but there are fewer left to share the earth's bounty. Then the adult rush into marriage. A year of pestilence is followed by a year of weddings;* and such a "strange eventful history" does the Stratford register tell. The Charnel-house-a melancholy-looking appendage to the chancel of Stratford Church, (now removed,) had then its heaps of unhonoured bones fearfully ais. turbed but soon the old tower heard again the wedding peal. The red

:

cross was probably not on the door of John Shakspere's dwelling. Fortunately for mankind," says Malone, "it did not reach the house where the infant Shakspere lay; for not one of that name appears on the dead list. A poetical enthusiast will find no difficulty in believing that, like Horace, he reposed secure and fearless in the midst of contagion and death, protected by the Muses to whom his future life was to be devoted :

6 sacrâ

Lauroque, collatâque myrto,

Non sine diis animosus infans.'"

There were more real dangers around Shakspere than could be averted by the sacred laurel and the myrtle-something more fearful than the serpent and the bear of the Roman poet.* * He, by whom

"Spirits are not finely touch'd

But to fine issues,"

may be said, without offence, to have guarded this unconscious child. William Shakspere was to be an instrument, and a great one, in the intellectual advancement of mankind. The guards that He placed around that threshold of Stratford, as secondary ministers, were cleanliness, abundance, free air, parental watchfulness. The "non sine diis "-the "protected by the Muses,"-rightly considered, must mean the same guardianship. Each is a recognition of something higher than accident and mere physical laws.

The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street-houses which still exist--houses which the people of England have agreed to preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. Nine years before William Shakspere was born, his father had also purchased two copyhold tenements in Stratford-one in Greenfield Street, one in Henley Street. The copyhold house in Henley Street, purchased in 1555, was unquestionably not one of the freehold houses in the same street, purchased in 1574: yet, from Malone's loose way of stating that in 1555 the lease of a House in Henley Street was assigned to John Shakspere, it has been conjectured that he purchased in 1574 the house he had occupied for many years. As he purchased two houses in 1555 in different parts of the town, it is not likely that he occupied both; he might not have occupied either. Before he purchased the two houses in Henley Street, in 1574, he occupied fourteen acres of meadow-land, with appurtenances, at a very high rent; the property is called Ingon meadow in "the Close Rolls." Dugdale calls the place where it was situated "Inge;" saying that it was a member of the manor of Old Stratford, and 'signifyeth in our old English a meadow or low ground, the name well agreeing with its situation." It is about a mile and a quarter from the town of Stratford, on the road to Warwick. William Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copyhold houses, in Greenhill Street, or in Henley Street; he might have bee born at Ingon; or his father might have occupied one of the two freehoid

Hor. lib. iii., car. iv.

"

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houses in Henley Street at the time of the birth of his eldest son. Tradition says that William Shakspere was born in one of these houses; tradition points out the very room in which he was born.

Whether Shakspere were born here. or not, there can be little doubt that this property was the home of his boyhood. It was purchased by John Shakspere, from Edmund Hall and Emma his wife, for forty pounds. In a copy of the chirograph of the fine levied on this occasion (which came into the possession of Mr. Wheler, of Stratford), the property is described as two messuages, two gardens, and two orchards, with their appurtenances. This document does not define the situation of the property, beyond its being in Stratford-upon-Avon; but in the deed of sale of another property in 1591, that property is described as situate between the houses of Robert Johnson and John Shakspere; and in 1597 John Shakspere himself sells a "toft, or parcel of land," in Henley Street, to the purchaser of the property in 1591. The properties can be traced, and leave no doubt of this house in Henley Street being the residence of John Shakspere. He retained the property during his life; and it descended, as his heir-at-law, to his son William. In the last testament of the poet is this bequest to his "sister Joan"-"I do will and devise unto her the house, with the appurtenances, in Stratford, wherein she dwelleth, for her natural life, under the yearly rent of twelve-pence." His sister Joan, whose name by marriage was Hart, was residing there in 1639, and she probably continued to reside there till her death in 1646. The one house in which Mrs. Hart resided was doubtless the half of the building that formed, twenty years ago, the butcher's shop and the tenement adjoining; for the other house was known as the Maidenhead Inn in 1642. In another part of Shakspere's will he bequeaths, amongst the bulk of his property, to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, with remainder to her male issue,"two messuages or tenements, with the appurtenances, situate, lying, and being in Henley Street, within the borough of Stratford." There were existing settlements of this very property in the family of Shakspere's eldest daughter and grand-daughter; and this grand-daughter, Elizabeth Nash, who was married a second time to Sir John Barnard, left both houses,-namely, "the inn, called the Maidenhead, and the adjoining house and barn,"-to her kinsmen Thomas and George Hart, the grandsons of her grandfather's" sister Joan." These persons left descendants, with whom this property remained until the beginning of the present century. But it was gradually diminished. The orchards and gardens were originally extensive: a century ago tenements had been built upon them, and they were alienated by the Hart then in possession. The Maidenhead Inn became the Swan Inn, and afterwards the Swan and Maidenhead. The White Lion, on the other side of the property, was extended, so as to include the remaining orchards and gardens. The house in which Mrs. Hart had lived so long became divided into two tenements; and at the end of the last century the lower part of one was a butcher's shop. According to the Aubrey tradition, some persons believed this to have been the original shop where John Shakspere pursued his calf-killing vocation with the aid of his illustrious son. Mr. Wheler, in a very interesting account of these premises, and their mutations, published in 1824, tells us that