poverty. In 1847 the Shakespeare house passed into the hands of an association under whose care it has been renovated; but unfortunately, like some of the Shakespeare poetry, not restored to a close resemblance to its first condition; though that was perhaps impossible. Whether it was in this house that John Shakespeare and his wife, with their only precious child, staid out the plague, which visited Stratford in

1564, or whether they fled to some uninfected place, we do not know. But families did not move freely in those days, or easily find house-room; and on the 30th of August in that year John Shakespeare, as the Stratford register tells, was at a hall or meeting, held in a garden, probably for fear of infection. On this occasion he gave twelve pence for the relief of poor sufferers. The highest sum given was seven shil

lings and four pence, the lowest, six pence; and there were but two burgesses who gave more than twelve pence. In September he gave six pence more, and in October eighteen pence. It may be assumed as quite certain, then, that the Shakespeares remained at Stratford during the plague, thus leaving William, like any other child, in peril of the pestilence. They passed through a period of fearful trial. The scourge made Stratford desolate. In six months one sixth of their

neighbors were buried. But although around them there was hardly a house in which there was not one dead, there was a charm upon their threshold, and William Shakespeare lived.

In the next year the father was chosen one of the fourteen aldermen of the town; and in 1568 he was made high bailiff, which office he filled one year. He continued to prosper, and in 1570 he took under his cultivation yet other lands, a farm called Ington, at the then goodly rent of £8. The year 1571 saw him chief alderman; and in 1575 he bought two freehold houses in Henley Street, with gardens and orchards. William Shakespeare, therefore, at ten years of age was the son of one of the most substantial and respected men of Stratford, who was one of its fourteen burgesses, and who had rapidly attained, step by step, the highest honors in the gift of his townsmen. He was styled Master Shakespeare a designation the manly style of which we have belittled into Mister, voiding it at the same time of its honorable significance. As high bailiff and chief alderman he sat as justice of the peace, and thus even became worshipful.' There has been much dispute as to what was his occupation at this time; his glover's trade having been before abandoned. Rowe, on Betterton's authority, says that he was " a considerable dealer in wool." John Aubrey the anti

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quary, or rather quid-tunc, says that he was a butcher: in a deed dated 1579, and in another seventeen years later, he is called a yeoman; and his name appears in a list of the gentlemen and freeholders of Barlichway hundred in 1580. One of his fellow-aldermen, who was his predecessor in the office of bailiff, was a butcher; but with our knowledge of his landed possessions and his consequent agricultural occupation, we may be pretty sure that his nearest approach to that useful business was in having his own cattle killed on his own premises. Wool he might well have sold from the backs of his own flocks without being properly a wooldealer. But what was his distinctive occupation is a matter of very little consequence, except as it may have affected the early occupation of his son, and of not much, even in that regard. He was plainly in a condition of life which secured that son the means of a healthy physical and moral development, and which, if he had lived in New England a century or a century and a half later, would have made him regarded, if a well-mannered man, as fit company for the squire and the parson and the best people of the township, and emboldened him perhaps to aspire to a seat in the General Court of the Colony. But the first that we hear of John Shakespeare is, that in 1552 he and a certain Humphrey Reynolds and Adrian Quiney made a muck-heap in Henley Street, against the order of the Court; for which dirty piece of business they were punished by a fine, as they well deserved. Yet next year John Shakespeare and Adrian Quiney repeated the unsavory offence, and this time in company with the bailiff himself. plain that William Shakespeare's father was not singular in the uncleanliness of his habits in this respect. Stratford on Avon was a dirty village; yet not dirtier, perhaps, than most villages were three hundred years ago. Out-door cleanliness and order are among the

It is

for

modern improvements upon former ways of living; and even at the period referred to, the apartments in noblemen's houses and in palaces were so neglected that they became offensive to the senses, and perfumes were burned in them, a substitute a very poor one the use of broom, and soap, and water. Stratford, also, like most country villages three centuries ago, was composed chiefly of thatched cottages and small farm-houses, the meaner of which were without chimneys and glazed windows, and most of which would

be pronounced uninhabitable nowadays by people of the means and condition of those by whom they were then inhabited. But, after the fashion of those times, in the midst of these hovels were a few fine mansions, and a large and beautiful stone church; and over the fertile, gently rolling country round were scattered the stately country houses of the gentry. A fine stone bridge of fourteen arches had been built here across the Avon by Sir Hugh Clopton, who also built the Great House, a mansion afterward called New Place, and in which the readers of these Memoirs are interested.

II.

What was the education of William Shakespeare were a question indeed of interest to all reasonable creatures, and, to those who think that education makes great men, of singular importance. But of his teachers we know nothing, save of one his father. What were his moth er's traits of character, and whether by maternity and training she had transmitted any of them to her son, we cannot tell. In which ignorance there is a kind of bliss to those people who have taken up the novel notion of the day, that men of mark derive their mental and their moral gifts, not from the father, but the mother.

Mary Arden may have been such a woman as it would please us to imagine the mother of William Shakespeare; but the limits of our knowledge oblige us to look upon him during childhood only under the tutelage of the father, whose good sense and strong character are shown by his rapid and steady rise of fortune and advancement among his townsmen. His son was taught, we may be sure, to fear God and honor the King, and in the words of the Catechism, to learn and labor truly to get his own living, and do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him; for that was the sum and substance of the hometeaching of our forefathers. For book instruction, there was the Free Grammar School of Stratford, well endowed by Thomas Jolyffe in the reign of Edward IV., forever therefore let his name be honored! where, unless it differed from all others of its kind, he could have learned Latin and some Greek. Some English, too; but not much; for English was held in scorn by

• "Moriamur pro rege nostro;" as applicable to Elizabeth of England a aria Theresa of Hungary.