stood there was an annual disbursement there going forward which has been computed to be equal to eighty thousand pounds of our present money.* The revenues, principally derived from manors and tenements in eight different counties, are seized upon by the Crown. The site of the abbey is sold or granted to a private person, who will derive his immediate advantage by the rapid destruction of a pile of buildings which the piety and opulence of five or six centuries had been rearing. More than a hundred and fifty inmates of this monastery are turned loose upon the world, a few with miserable pensions, but the greater number reduced to absolute indigence. Half the population at least of the town of Evesham must have derived a subsistence from the expenditure of these inmates, and this fountain is now almost wholly dried up. In the youth of William Shakspere it is impossible that Evesham could have been other than a ruined and desolate place. It was the policy of the unscrupulous reformers-who, whatever service they may ultimately have worked in the destruction of superstitious observances, were, as politicians, the most dishonest and rapacious-it was their policy, when (to use their own heartless cant) they had driven away the crows and destroyed their nests, to heap every opprobrium upon the heads of the starving and houseless brethren, of whom it has been computed that fifty thousand were wandering through the land. The young Shakspere was in all probability brought into contact with some of the aged men who had been driven from the peaceful homes of their youth, where they had been brought up in scholastic exercises, and had looked forward to advance in honourable office, each in his little world. Some one of the Gray Friars of Coventry, or the Bencdictines of

Evesham, must he have encountered, hovering round the scenes of their ancient prosperity; sheltered perhaps in the cottage of some old servant who could labour with his hands, and upon whom the common misfortune therefore had fallen lightly.

History of Evesham," by George May. A remarkably intelligent local guide.

These his

The friars of the future great dramatist would, of necessity, be characters formed either out of his early observation, or moulded according to the general impressions of his early associates. In his mature life the race would be extinct. dramatic representations are wonderfully consistent; and it is manifest that he looked upon the persecuted order with pity and with respect. It was for Chaucer to satirize the monastic life in the days of its greatness and abundance. It was for this rare painter of manners to show the grasping dissimulating friar, sitting down upon the churl's bench, and endeavouring to frighten or wheedle the bed-ridden man out of his money :—

"Thomas, nought of your tressor I desire

As for myself, but that all our covent
To pray for you is aye so diligent."

The ridicule in those times of the Church's pride might be salutary; but other days had come. The most just and tolerant moralist that ever helped to disencumber men of their hatreds and prejudices has consistently endeavoured to represent the monastic character as that of virtue and benevolence. One of Shakspere's earliest plays is "Romeo and Juliet ;" and many of the rhymed portions of that delicious tragedy might have been the desultory compositions of a very young poet, to be hereafter moulded into the dramatic form. Such is the graceful soliloquy which first introduces Friar Lawrence. The kind old man, going forth from his cell in the morning twilight to fill his osier basket with weeds and flowers, and moralizing on the properties of plants which at once yield poison and medicine, has all the truth of individual portraiture. But Friar Lawrence is also the representative of a class. The Infirmarist of a monastic house, who had charge of the sick brethren, was often in the early days of medical science their sole physician. The book-knowledge and the experience of such a valuable member of a conventual body would still allow him to exercise useful functions when thrust into the world; and the young Shakspere may have known some kindly old man, full of axiomatic wisdom, and sufficiently confident in his own management, like the well-meaning Friar Lawrence. In "Much Ado about Nothing," it is the friar who, when Hero is unjustly accused by him who should have been her husband, vindicates her reputation with as much sagacity as charitable zeal :

"I have mark'd

A thousand blushing apparitions start
Into her face; a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness bear away those blushes;
And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire,
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth :-Call me a fool;
Trust not my reading, nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,

If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error."

In "Measure for Measure" the whole plot is carried on by the Duke assuming the reverend manners, and professing the active benevolence, of a friar; and his agents and confidants are Friar Thomas and Friar Peter. In an age when the prejudices of the multitude were flattered and stimulated by abuse and ridicule of the ancient ecclesiastical character, Shakspere always exhibits it so as to command respect and affection. The poisoning of King John by a monk, "a resolved villain," is despatched by him with little more than an allusion. The Germans believe that Shakspere wrote the old King John in two Parts. The vulgar exaggeration of the

basest calumnies against the monastic character satisfies us that the play was written by one who formed a much lower estimate than Shakspere did of the dignity of the poet's office, as an instructor of the people.

A deep reverence for antiquity is one of the clearest indications of the intimate union of the poetical and the philosophical temperament. An able writer of our own day has indeed said, “In some, the love of antiquity produces a sort of fanciful illusion and the very sight of those buildings, so magnificent in their prosperous hour, so beautiful even in their present ruin, begets a sympathy for those who founded and inhabited them."* But, rightly considered, the fanciful illusion becomes a reasonable principle. Those who founded and inhabited these monastic buildings were for ages the chief directors of the national mind. Their possessions were, in truth, the possessions of all classes of the people. The highest offices in those establishments were in some cases bestowed upon the noble and the wealthy, but they were open to the very humblest. The studious and the devout here found a shelter and a solace. The learning of the monastic bodies has been underrated; the ages in which they flourished have been called dark ages; but they were almost the sole depositories of the knowledge of the land. They were the historians, the grammarians, the poets. They accumulated magnificent libraries. They were the barriers that checked the universal empire of brute force. They cherished an ambition higher and more permanent than could belong to the mere martial spirit. They stood between the strong and the weak. They held the oppressor in subjection to that power which results from the cultivation, however misdirected, of the spiritual part of our nature. Whilst the proud baron continued to live in the same dismal castle that his predatory fathers had built or won, the churchmen went on from age to age adding to their splendid edifices, and demanding a succession of ingenious artists to carry out their lofty ideas. The devotional exercises of their life touched the deepest feelings of the human heart. Their solemn services, handed down from a remote antiquity, gave to music its most ennobling cultivation ; and the most beautiful of arts thus became the vehicle of the loftiest enthusiasm. Individuals amongst them, bringing odium upon the class, might be sordid, luxurious, idle, in some instances profligate. It is the nature of great prosperity and apparent security to produce these results. But it was not the mandate of a pampered tyrant, nor the edicts of a corrupt parliament, that could destroy the reverence which had been produced by an intercourse of eight hundred years with the great body of the people. The form of venerable institutions may be changed, but their spirit is indestructible. The holy places and mansions of the Church were swept away; but the memory of them could not be destroyed. Their ruins, recent as they were, were still antiquities, full of instruction. The lightning had blasted the old oak, and its green leaves were no longer put forth; but the gnarled trunk was a thing not to be despised. The convulsion which had torn the land was of a nature to make deep thinkers. After the wonder and the disappointment of great revolutions have subsided, there must always be an outgushing of earnest thought. The form which that thought may assume may be the result of accident; it may be poetical or metaphysical, historical or scientific. By a combination of circumstances,—perhaps by the circumstance of one man being born who had the most marvellous insight into human nature, and whose mind could penetrate all the disguises of the social state, the drama became the great exponent of the thought of the age of Elizabeth. It was altogether a new form for English poetry to put on. The drama, as we have seen, had been the humblest vehicle for popular excitement. When the Church ceased to use it as an instrument of instruction, it fell into the hands of illiterate mimics. The courtly writers were too busy with their affectations and their flatteries

*Hallam's "Constitutional History of England."

to recognise its power, and its especial applicability to the new state of society. Those who were of the people; who watched the manifestations of the popular feeling and understanding; whose minds had been stirred up by the political storms, the violence of which had indeed passed away, but under whose influence the whole social state still heaved like a disturbed sea;-those were to build up our great national drama. But, at the period of which we are speaking, they were for the most part boys, or very young men. It is perhaps fortunate for us that the most eminent of these was introduced to the knowledge of life under no particular advantages; was not dedicated to any one of the learned professions; was cloistered not in an university; was an adherent of no party; was obliged to look forward to the necessity of earning his own maintenance, and yet not humiliated by poverty and meanness. William Shakspere looked upon the very remarkable state of society with which he was surrounded, with a free spirit. But he saw at one and the same time the present and the past. He knew that the entire social state is a thing of progress; that the characters of men are as much dependent upon remote influences as upon the matters with which they come in daily contact; that the individual essentially belongs to the general, and the temporary to the universal. His drama can never be antiquated, because he primarily deals with whatever is permanent and indestructible in the aspects of external nature, and in the constitution of the human mind. But, at the same time, it is no less a faithful transcript of the prevailing modes of thought even of his own day. Individual peculiarities, in his time called humours, he left to others.

This principle of looking at life with an utter disregard of all party and sectarian feelings, of massing all his observations upon individual character, could have proceeded only from a profound knowledge of the past, and a more than common apprehension of the future. As we have endeavoured to show, the localities amidst which he lived were highly favourable to his cultivation of a poetical reverence for antiquity. But his unerring observation of the present prevented the past becoming to him an illusion. He had always an earnest patriotism; he had a strong sense of the blessings which had been conferred upon his own day through the security won out of peril and suffering by the middle classes. The destruction of the old institutions, after the first evil effects had been mitigated by the energy of the people, had diffused capital, and had caused it to be employed with more activity. But he, who scarcely ever stops to notice the political aspects of his own day, cannot forbear an indignant comment upon the sufferings of the very poorest, which, if not caused by, were at least coincident with, the great spoliation of the property of the Church. Poor Tom, "who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned," was no fanciful portrait; he is the creature of the pauper legislation of half a century. Exhortations in the churches, "for the furtherance of the relief of such as were in unfeigned misery," were prescribed by the statute of the 1st of Edward VI.; but the same statute directs that the unhappy wanderer, after certain forms of proving that he has not offered himself for work, shall be marked V with a hot iron upon his breast, and adjudged to be "a slave" for two years to him who brings him before justices of the peace; and the statute goes on to direct the slaveowner "to cause the said slave to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." Three years afterwards the statute is repealed, seeing that it could not be carried into effect by reason of the multitude of vagabonds and the extremity of their wants. The whipping and the stocking were applied by successive enactments of Elizabeth. The gallows, too, was always at hand to make an end of the wanderers, when, hunted from tithing to tithing, they inevitably became thieves. Nothing but a compulsory provision for the maintenance of the poor could then have saved England from a * "King Lear," Act III., Scene IV.

fearful Jacquerie. It cannot reasonably be doubted that the vast destruction of capital, by the dissolution of the monasteries, threw for many years a quantity of superfluous labour upon the yet unsettled capital of the ordinary industry of the country. The prodigious changes in the value of money, favourable as they ultimately were to the development of industry, raised the prices of commodities without raising wages,-an inevitable consequence of that natural law which makes wages wholly depend upon the number of the labourers. That Shakspere had witnessed much social misery is evident from his constant disposition to descry "a soul of goodness in things evil," and from his indignant hatred of the heartlessness of petty authority:

"Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand."

And yet, with many social evils about him, the age of Shakspere's youth was one in which the people were making a great intellectual progress. The poor were ill provided for. The Church was in an unsettled state, attacked by the natural restlessness of those who looked upon the Reformation with regret and hatred; and by the rigid enemies of its traditionary ceremonies and ancient observances, who had sprung up in its bosom. The promises which had been made that education should be fostered by the State had utterly failed; for even the preservation of the universities, and the protection and establishment of a few grammar-schools, had been unwillingly conceded by the avarice of those daring statesmen who had swallowed up the riches of the ancient establishment. The genial spirit of the English yeomanry had received a check from the intolerance of the powerful sect who frowned upon all sports and recreations-who despised the arts-who held poets and pipers to be " caterpillars of a commonwealth." But yet the wonderful stirring up of the intellect of the nation had made it an age favourable for the cultivation of the highest literature; and most favourable to those who looked upon society, as the young Shakspere must have looked, in the spirit of cordial enjoyment and practical wisdom.