built far higher in learning; solid but slow in his performances. Shakspeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and his invention." Enough has been said of this celebrated club by a variety of writers. There can be no doubt that there wit and merriment abounded to that degree, that as Beaumont has said in his epistle to Jonson, one of their meetings was enough to make up for all the stupidity of the city for three days past, and supply it for long to come; to make the worst companions right witty, and "downright fools more wise." There is as little doubt, however, that with Jonson in the chair, drinking would be as pre-eminent as the wit. The verses which he had inscribed over the door of the Apollo room, at the Devil Tavern, another of their resorts, are, spite of all vindications by ingenious pens, too indicative of that.

"Welcome all who lead or follow

To the oracle of Apollo:

Here he speaks out of his pottle,
Or the tin-pot, his tower bottle:
All his answers are divine;
Truth itself doth flow like wine.
Hang up all the poor hop-drinkers,
Cries old Sam, the king of skinkers.
He the half of life abuses

That sits watering with the Muses,

Those dull gods no good can mean us:
Wine-it is the cream of Venus,

And the poet's horse accounted:

Ply it, and you all are mounted.

"Tis the true Phoebian liquor,

Cheers the brain, makes it the quicker;

Pays all debts, cures all diseases,

And at once the senses pleases.
Welcome all who lead or follow
To the oracle of Apollo."

There is not any reason to believe that Shakspeare, lover of wit and jollity as he was, was a practical upholder of this pernicious doctrine. He may often make his characters speak in this manner, but personally he retired as soon as he could from this bacchanal life to his own quiet hearth at Stratford; and if

we are to believe his sonnets addressed to his wife, and they possess the tone of a deep and real sentiment, he seriously rued the orgies in which he had participated.

"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmfull deeds,
That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds :
Hence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand;-
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell,* 'gainst my strong infection.
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
No double penance to correct correction.
Pity me, then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me."

We cannot read these and many other portions of his sonnets, we cannot see Shakspeare retiring every year, and as soon as able, altogether from the bacchanalian and dissipated habits of the literary men of the day, to the peaceful place of his birth, and the purity of his wedded home, without respecting his moral character as much as we admire his genius. The praises and the practice of drunkenness by literary men, and poets especially, have entailed infinite mischief on themselves, and on their followers. What woes and degradations are connected with the history of brilliant men about town, which have tended to stamp the general literary character with the brand of improvidence and disrespect ;-jails, deaths, picking out of gutters, sponginghouses, and domestic misery,-how thickly do all these rise on our view as we look back through the history of men of genius, the direct result of the absurd rant about drinking and debauch! With what a beautiful purity do the names of the greatest geniuses of all rise above these details, like the calm spires of churches through the fogs and smokes of London! How cheering is it to see the number of these grow with the growth of years! Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley,-have all been sober and domestic

* Vinegar.

men; and the sanction which they have given by their practice to the proprieties of life, will confer on all future ages blessings as ample as the public truths of their teaching. The Mermaid Tavern, like the other haunts of Shakspeare, has disappeared. It was swept away by the fire. If any traces of his haunts remain, they must be in the houses of the great, where he was accustomed to visit, as those of the Lords Southampton, Leicester, Pembroke, Montgomery, and others. These are, however, now all either gone or so cut up and metamorphosed, that it were vain to look for them as abodes hallowed by the footsteps of Shakspeare. If it be true that he was commanded to read his play of Falstaff in love, the Merry Wives of Windsor,-to Queen Elizabeth, it would probably be at Whitehall or St. James's, for Somerset-House was comparatively little occupied by her.

The very places in London more particularly illustrated by his genius have too much followed the fate of those in which he lived. It is true, the Tower, Westminster Palace, and some other of those public buildings and old localities where the scenes of his national dramas are laid, still remain, spite of time and change; and the sites of others, though now covered with wildernesses of fresh houses, may be identified. But The Boar's Head in East Cheap is annihilated; it, too, fell in the great fire, and the modern improvements thereabout, the erection of new London Bridge, and the cutting of King William-street, have swept away nearly all remaining marks of the neighbourhood. It is supposed that the present statue of William IV. stands not very far from the spot where Hal revelled and Sir John swaggered and drank sack.

Over London, and many a spot in and about it, as well as over a thousand later towns, forests, and mountains, of this and other countries, wherever civilised man has played his part, will the genius of Shakspeare cast an undying glory; but to see the actual traces of his existence we must resort to the place of his nativity and his death. There still stand the house and the room in which he was born; there stands the house in which he wooed his Ann Hathaway, and the old garden in which he walked with her. There stands his tomb, to which the great, and the wise,

and the gifted from all regions of the world have made pilgrimage, followed by millions of those who would be thought so, the frivolous and the empty; but all paying homage, by the force of reason, or the force of fashion, vanity and imitation, to the universal interpreter of humanity. It is well that the slow change of a country town has permitted the spirit of veneration to alight there, and cast its protecting wings over the earthly traces of that existence which diffused itself as a second life through all the realms of intellect.

There is nothing missing of Shakspeare's there but the house which he built, and the mulberry-tree which he planted. The tree was hewn down, the house was pulled down and dispersed piecemeal, by the infamous parson Gastrell; who thus "damned himself to eternal fame," more thoroughly than the fool who fired the Temple of Diana. There, only a few miles distant, is the stately hall of Charlecote, whither the youthful poacher of Parnassus was carried before the unlucky knight. There too, and, oh shame! shame to England, shame to the lovers of Shakspeare, shame to those who annually turn Stratford and their club into a regular "Eatanswill," on pretence of honouring Shakspeare; there too live the descendants of the nearest relative of Shakspeare of his sister Joan-in unnoticed and unmitigated poverty! Seven years ago, on my visit to this place, I pointed out this fact; and now that the disgraceful fact still remains, I will once more record the words I then wrote.

"As I went to Shottry, I met with a little incident, which interested me greatly by its unexpectedness. As I was about to pass over a stile at the end of Stratford, into the fields leading to that village, I saw the master of the national school mustering his scholars to their tasks. I stopped, being pleased with the look of the old man, and said, 'You seem to have a considerable number of lads here; shall you raise another Shakspeare from amongst them, think you?' 'Why,' replied the master, 'I have a Shakspeare now in the school.' I knew that Shakspeare had no descendants beyond the second generation, and I was not aware that there was any of his family remaining. But it seems that the posterity of his sister, Joan Hart, who is men

tioned in his will, yet exist; part under her marriage name of Hart, at Tewkesbury, and a family in Stratford, of the name of Smith.

"I have a Shakspeare here,' said the master, with evident pride and pleasure. Here, boys, here!' He quickly mustered his laddish troop in a row, and said to me, 'There now, sir, can you tell which is a Shakspeare?' I glanced my eye along the line, and instantly fixing it on one boy, said-That is the Shakspeare.' 'You are right,' said the master, that is the Shakspeare; the Shakspeare cast of countenance is there. That is William Shakspeare Smith, a lineal descendant of the poet's sister.'

"The lad was a fine lad of, perhaps, ten years of age; and, certainly, the resemblance to the bust of Shakspeare in the church at Stratford is wonderful, considering he is not descended from Shakspeare himself, but from his sister; and that the seventh in descent. What is odd enough is, whether it be mere accident or not, that the colour of the lad's eyes, a light hazel, is the very same as that given to those of the Shakspeare bust, which, it is well known, was originally coloured, and of which exact copies remain.

"I gave the boy sixpence, telling him I hoped he would make as great a man as his ancestor-the best term I could lay hold of for the relationship, though not the true one. The boy's eyes sparkled at the sight of the money, and the healthful, joyous colour rushed into his cheeks; his fingers continued making acquaintance with so large a piece of money in his pocket, and the sensation created by so great an event in the school was evident. It sounded oddly enough, as I was passing along the street in the evening, to hear some of these same schoolboys say one to another, That is the gentleman who gave Bill Shakspeare sixpence.'

"Which of all the host of admirers of Shakspeare, who has plenty of money, and does not know what to do with it, will think of giving that lad, one of the nearest representatives of the great poet, an education, and a fair chance to raise himself in the world? The boy's father is a poor man,—if I be