fact that this poet's personality, fate, and happiness, have had an interest for the whole civilized world, which we will venture to say was unparalleled. It is within the writer's recollection how, in the obscure mountain town where she spent her early days, the life of William Shakspere had penetrated, and the belief in the gentleness of "fancy's child" was universal.

All this while it does not appear to occur to the thousands of unreflecting readers that they are listening merely to the story of his fellow mummers, and that the one witness whose evidence would be best worth having, has never spoken at all. Nay more, this witness, this unhappy but devoted wife, who was a being possessed of an almost supernatural power of moral divination, and a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive, has been assumed to have been unworthy of her accomplished husband; and the artless Mr. Moore, in his life of the lately-unmasked demon, Lord Byron, thus alludes to this angelic woman :--" By whatever austerity of temper or habits, the poets Dante and Milton may have drawn upon themselves such a fate, it might be expected that the gentle Shakspere' would have stood exempt from the common calamity of his brethren. But amongst the very few facts of his life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly proved than the unhappiness of his marriage."

It was of this one witness, whose faithful lips were sealed by affection, and of her terrible existence while her husband was rioting in London, shut up in the lonely country home made hideous to her by her knowledge of the dark and guilty secret hidden within its walls, that the poet was evidently thinking when he wrote the awful lines:

"But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul;"

but she remained silent, even to her own parents, whose feelings she magnanimously spared.

The veil which has hitherto covered this dark history may now be withdrawn. The time has come when the truth may be told. All the actors in the scene have long disappeared from the stage of mortal existence, and passed, let us have faith to hope, into a world where they would desire to expiate their faults by instituting-did not the lapse of time unfortunately render all scientific investigation useless-a coroner's inquest upon the remains which, several centuries

earlier, would have been found beneath a certain crab, and a certain mulberry tree, in the vicinity of Stratford-upon-Avon.

From the height at which he might have been happy as a most successful dramatist, and the husband of an almost divine woman, Mr. Shakspere fell into the depths of secret criminal homicide, assisted, in the later part of his career, by a blood relation;-discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilised society. From henceforth this damning, guilty secret, became the ruling force in his life; holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling him with remorse and anguish and insane dread of detection. His various friends, seeing that he was wretched, pressed marriage upon him.

In an hour of reckless desperation he proposed to Anne Hathaway. The world knows well that Mr. Shakspere had the gift of expression, and will not be surprised that he wrote a very beautiful letter. It ran thus :

"To the celestial, my soul's idol, the most beautified Anne Hathaway. In her excellent white bosom, these:

Doubt that the stars are fire,

Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.

Oh, dear Anne, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, oh most best, believe it. Thine ever, most dear lady, while this machine is to him,

"WILLIAM SHAKSPERE."

The woman who had already learned to love him, fell at once into the snare. Her answer was a frank, outspoken avowal of her love for him; giving herself to him heart and hand. The treasure of affection he had secured, was like a vision of a lost heaven to a soul in hell. But he could follow his own maxim, he could

"Look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it."

Before the world, therefore, and to his intimates, he was the successful fiancé, conscious all the while of the deadly secret that lay cold at the bottom of his heart.

Not all at once did the full knowledge of the dreadful reality into which she had entered come upon the young wife. She knew vaguely from the wild avowals of the first hours of their marriage, that there was a dreadful secret of guilt; that Mr. Shakspere's soul was torn Vol. IV., N. S. 1869.

F

with agonies of remorse. In one of her moonlight walks near the crab-tree, which, from Mr. Shakspere's being so frequently seen nearit, tradition, though unsuspicious of the dreadful truth,-has connected with his name, there came an hour of revelation; an hour when, in a manner which left no kind of room for doubt, she beheld her husband interring the corpse of one of those unfortunate minor playwrights, whom he had a morbid passion for destroying, after purloining the plots of their inferior dramas, which his genius then rendered immortal,-and saw the full depth of the abyss of infamy which her marriage was expected to cover, and understood that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this villany. It was to their lonely country house in Warwickshire, that the victims were one by one enticed by him, when he returned there from the wild orgies of his tavern life in London; and there can be no doubt that a dark suspicion of the dreadful truth had flashed across the mind of the unhappy Robert Greene, when he wrote his dying exhortation to his friends, warning them against the "painted monsters" of whom Shakspere's troop was composed; "yes, trust them not for there is among them an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide," &c.; and even Dr. Johnson, though he appears to have been too careless or too obtuse to penetrate farther into the mystery, admits that " he fled to London from the terror of a criminal prosecution."

The hasty marriage of a youth scarcely nineteen with a woman of twenty-six, is thus explained. He required an accomplice, a cloak; a gentle uncomplaining wife to dwell in retirement in the lonely country house this London roisterer was compelled to maintain at a distance from the scene of his dramatic triumphs.

We have said that the young wife now beheld the full depths of the infamy her marriage was to cover. It was then that he bade her in his own forcible and terrible words :

"look thou down into this den

And see a fearful sight of blood and death.

The reason of the substitution of an elder tree for a crab tree in the drama, is obvious. Even the morbid dwelling on his own crimes which impelled him con

The evidences of an agonised conscience are so thickly strewn throughout his works, that we might almost quote at random :

"I, as his host

That should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself."

"Oh, my offence is rank, it smells to Heaven,

It hath the primal eldest curse upon it."

Anyone who reads the tragedies of "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Titus Andronicus," &c., with this story in his mind, will see that it is true. Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure: some would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the crime. Mrs. Shakspere did neither. She would neither leave her husband nor betray him; nor would she for one moment justify his sin, and hence came thirty-two years of convulsive struggle, in which sometimes for a time the good angel appeared to gain ground, and then the evil one returned with sevenfold vehemence.

His eldest daughter, Susannah, for whom his preference is so plainly shown in his will, became the partner of his guilt. Mr. Shakspere argued his case with her, with his noble wife, and with himself, with all the sophistries of his powerful mind,

"Do what you will, to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime."

"'Tis better to be vile, than vile esteemed."

"I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange."

tinually to allude to them in his writings, could not entirely blind him, even in his most conscience-stricken moments, to the danger of being too explicit. At a later period, when Mr. Shakspere removed to New Place, the guilty secret was hidden beneath a mulberry tree.

"No more be grieved at that which thou hast done :
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud ;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorising thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,

Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are.”

These devilish sophistries, though unable to shake his lofty-minded wife, were ruinous to the unfortunate child of sin, born with a curse upon her, over whose wayward nature Mrs. Shakspere watched with a mother's tenderness; though the task was a difficult one, from the strange abnormal propensity to murder inherited by the object of her cares. But though he could thus warp this young soul, his divine wife followed him through all his sophistical reasonings with a keener reason. She besought and implored him in the name of his better nature and by all the glorious things he was capable of being and doing; and she had just power enough to convulse and agonize; but not power enough to subdue.

These thirty-two years, during which Mrs. Shakspere was struggling to bring her husband back to his better self, were a series of passionate convulsions. Towards the last she and her husband saw less and less of each other, and he came more decidedly under evil influences, and seemed to acquire a sort of hatred to her.

"If ere I loved her, all that love is gone;

My heart to her but as in guest-wise sojourn'd."

He had tried his strength with her fully: he had attempted to confuse her sense of right and wrong, and bring her into the ranks of those convenient women who regard marriage as a sort of friendly alliance to cover murder on both sides. When her husband described to her the Continental cities where midnight assassinations were habitual things, and the dark marriages in which complaisant couples mutually agreed to form the cloak for each other's murders, and gave her to understand that in this way alone could she have a peaceful and friendly life with him, she simply said, "Master Shakspere, I am too truly thy friend to do this."

Mr. Shakspere's treatment of his wife during the sensitive periods that preceded the births of her three children, was always marked by paroxysms of unmanly brutality, for which the only possible charity on her part was the supposition of insanity. He himself alludes to it, with his usual sophistry, where he speaks of "his eye in a fine