The Project Gutenberg eBook, English Lands Letters and Kings: From Elizabeth to Anne, by Donald Grant Mitchell

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

From Elizabeth to Anne

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS

By Donald G. Mitchell

Each one volume, 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

From Elizabeth to Anne

BY
Donald G. Mitchell

NEW YORK
Charles Scribner’s Sons
MDCCCXCVI

Copyright, 1890, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.

PREFATORY LETTER.

[To Mrs. J. C. G. Piatt, of Utica School, N. Y.]

My Dear Julia,—We have both known, in the past, a certain delightsome country home; you—in earliest childhood, and I—in latest youth-time: and I think we both relish those reminders—perhaps a Kodak view, or an autumn gentian plucked by the road-side, or actual glimpse of its woods, or brook, on some summer’s drive—which have brought back the old homestead, with its great stretch of undulating meadow—its elms—its shady lanes—its singing birds—its leisurely going big-eyed oxen—its long, tranquil days, when the large heart of June was pulsing in all the leaves and all the air:

Well, even so, and by these light tracings of Lands and Kings, and little whiffs of metric music, I seek to bring back to you, and to your pupils and associates (who have so kindly received previous and kindred reminders) the rich memories of that great current of English letters setting steadily forward amongst these British lands, and these sovereigns, from Elizabeth to Anne. But slight as these glimpses are, and as this synopsis may be, they will together serve, I hope, to fasten attention where I wish to fasten it, and to quicken appetite for those fuller and larger studies of English Literature and History, which shall make even these sketchy outlines valued—as one values little flowerets plucked from old fields—for bringing again to mind the summers of youth-time, and a world of summer days, with their birds and abounding bloom.

Affectionately yours,
D. G. M.

EDGEWOOD; MARCH, 1890.

CONTENTS.

ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS.

CHAPTER I.

We take outlook to-day from the threshold of the seventeenth century. Elizabeth is dead (1603), but not England. The powers it had grown to under her quickening offices are all alive. The great Spanish dragon has its teeth drawn; Cadiz has been despoiled, and huge galleons, gold-laden, have come trailing into Devon ports. France is courteously friendly. Holland and England are in leash, as against the fainter-growing blasts of Popedom. In Ireland, Tyrone has been whipped into bloody quietude. A syndicate of London merchants, dealing in pepper and spices, has made the beginnings of that East-Indian empire which gives to the present British sovereign her proudest title. London is growing apace in riches and in houses; though her shipping counts for less than the Dutch shipping, great cargoes come and go through the Thames—spices from the East, velvets and glass from the Mediterranean, cloths from the Baltic. Cheapside is glittering with the great array of goldsmiths’ shops four stories high, and new painted and new gilded (in 1594) by Sir Richard Martin, Mayor. The dudes of that time walk and “publish” their silken suits there, and thence through all the lanes leading to Paul’s Walk—which is, effectively, the aisle of the great church. There are noblemen who have tall houses in the city and others who have built along the Strand, with fine grounds reaching to the river and looking out upon the woods which skirt the bear-gardens of Bankside in Southwark. The river is all alive with boats—wherries, barges, skiffs. There are no hackney carriages as yet for hire; but rich folks here and there rumble along the highways in heavy Flemish coaches.

Some of the great lights we have seen in the intellectual firmament of England have set. Burleigh is gone; Hooker is gone, in the prime of his years; Spenser gone, Marlowe gone, Sidney gone. But enough are left at the opening of the century and at the advent of James (1603) to keep the great trail of Elizabethan literary splendors all aglow. George Chapman (of the Homer) is alive and active; and so are Raleigh, and Francis Bacon, and Heywood, and Dekker, and Lodge. Shakespeare is at his best, and is acting in his own plays at the newly built Globe Theatre. Michael Drayton is in full vigor, plotting and working at the tremendous poem from which we culled—in advance—a pageful of old English posies. Ben Jonson, too, is all himself, whom we found a giant and a swaggerer, yet a man of great learning and capable of the delicious bits of poesy which I cited. You will further remember how we set right the story of poor Amy Robsart—told of the great Queen’s vanities—of her visitings—of her days of illness—and of the death of the last sovereign of the name of Tudor.

The Stuart Line.

Henceforth, for much time to come, we shall meet—when we encounter British royalty at all—with men of the house of Stuart. But how comes about this shifting of the thrones from the family of Tudor to the family of Stuart? I explained in a recent chapter how the name of Tudor became connected with the crown, by the marriage of a Welsh knight—Owen Tudor—with Katharine, widow of Henry V. Now let us trace, if we can, this name of Stuart. Henry VII. was a Tudor, and so was Henry VIII.; so were his three children who succeeded him—Edward, the bigot Mary, and Elizabeth; no one of these, however, left direct heirs; but Henry VIII. had a sister, Margaret, who married James IV. of Scotland. This James was a lineal descendant of a daughter of Robert Bruce, who had married Walter Stuart, the chief of a powerful Scotch family. That James I. of whom I have spoken, who was a delicate poet, and so long a prisoner in Windsor Tower, was great-grandson of this Stuart-daughter of Robert Bruce. And from him—that is from James I.—was directly descended James IV., who married the sister of Henry VIII. James IV. had a son, succeeding him, called James V. who by a French marriage, became the father of that Frenchy queen, poor Marie of Scotland, who suffered at Fotheringay, and who had married her cousin, Henry Darnley (he also having Stuart blood), by whom she had a son, James Stuart—being James VI. of Scotland and James I. of England, who now succeeds Elizabeth.

This strong Scotch strain in the Stuart line of royalty will explain, in a certain degree, how ready so clannish a people as the Scotch were to join insurrection in favor of the exiled Stuarts; a readiness you will surely remember if you have read Waverley and Redgauntlet. And in further confirmation of this clannish love, you will recall the ever-renewed and gossipy boastfulness with which the old Scotch gentlewoman, Lady Margaret Bellenden, in Old Mortality, tells over and over of the morning when his most gracious majesty Charles II. partook of his disjune at Tillietudlem Castle.

But we have nothing to do with so late affairs now, and I have only made this diversion into Scotland to emphasize the facts about the Stuart affiliation to the throne of England, and the reasons for Scotch readiness to fling caps in the air for King Charlie or for the Pretender.

James I.

And now what sort of person was this James Stuart, successor to Elizabeth? He was a man in his thirty-eighth year, who had been a king—or called a king, of Scotland—ever since he was a baby of twelve months old; and in many matters he was a baby still. He loved bawbles as a child loves its rattle; loved bright feathers too—to dress his cap withal; was afraid of a drawn sword and of hobgoblins. He walked, from some constitutional infirmity, with the uncertain step of a child—swaying about in a ram-shackle way—steadying himself with a staff or a hold upon the shoulder of some attendant. He slobbered when he ate, so that his silken doublet—quilted to be proof against daggers—was never of the cleanest. He had a big head and protruding eyes, and would laugh and talk broad Scotch with a blundering and halting tongue, and crack unsavory jokes with his groom or his barber.

Yet he had a certain kindness of heart; he hated to see suffering, though he had no objection to suffering he did not see; the sight of blood almost made him faint; his affection for favorites sometimes broke out into love-sick drivel. Withal he had an acute mind; he had written bad poems, before he left Scotland, calling himself modestly a royal apprentice at that craft. He had a certain knack at logical fence and loved to argue a man to death; he had power of invective, as he showed in his Counterblast to Tobacco—of which I will give a whiff by and by. He had languages at command, and loved to show it; for he had studied long and hard in his young days, under that first and best of Scotch scholars and pedagogues—George Buchanan. He had, in general, a great respect for sacred things, and for religious observances—which did not prevent him, in his moments of petulant wrath or of wine-y exaltation, from swearing with a noisy vehemence. Lord Herbert of Cherbury—elder brother of the poet Herbert, and English ambassador to France—wittily excused this habit of his sovereign, by saying he was too kind to anathematize men himself, and therefore asked God to do so.

This was the man who was to succeed the great and courtly Elizabeth; this was the man toward whom all the place-hunters of the court now directed their thoughts, and (many of them) their steps too, eager to be among the foremost to bow in obsequience before him; besieging him, as every United States President is besieged, and will be besieged, until the disgraceful hunt for spoils is checked by some nobler purpose on the part of political victors than the rewarding of the partisans.

There was Sir Robert Cary—a far-away cousin of Elizabeth’s—who was so bewitched to be foremost in this agreeable business that he dashes away at a headlong gallop, night and day—before the royal couriers have started—gets thrown from his horse, who gave him a vicious blow with his heels, which he says “made me shed much blood.” But he pushes on and carries first to Edinburgh the tidings of the Queen’s death. Three days of the sharpest riding would only carry the news in those days; and the court messenger took a week or so to get over the heavy roads between the Scotch capital and London.

It does not appear that James made a show of much sorrow; he must have remembered keenly, through all his stolidity, how his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had suffered at Fotheringay; and remembered through whose fiat this dismal tragedy had come about. He hints that perhaps the funeral services had better not tarry for his coming;—writes that he would be glad of the crown jewels (which they do not send, however) for the new Queen’s wearing.

Then he sets off at leisure; travels at leisure; receiving deputations at leisure, and all manner of prostrations; stopping at Berwick; stopping at Belvoir Castle; stopping at York; stopping wherever was good eating or lodging or hunting; flatterers coming in shoals to be knighted by him; even the great Bacon, wanting to be Sir Francised—as he was presently: and I am afraid the poets of the time might have appeared, if they had possessed the wherewithal to make the journey, and were as hopeful of fat things.

Curiously enough, the King is grandly entertained in Huntingdonshire by one Oliver Cromwell, to whom James takes a great liking; not, of course, the great Cromwell; but this was the uncle and the godfather of the famous Oliver, who was to be chief instrument in bringing James’ royal son, Charles, to the scaffold. Thence the King goes for four or five days of princely entertainment to Theobalds, a magnificent seat of old Burleigh’s, where Elizabeth had gone often; and where his son, Cecil, now plies the King with flatteries, and poisons his mind perhaps against Raleigh—for whom Cecil has no liking;—perhaps representing that Raleigh, being in Parliament at the time, might have stayed the execution of Queen Mary, if he had chosen. The King is delighted with Theobalds; so far delighted that a few years after he exchanges for it his royal home of Hatfield House, which magnificent place is still held by a descendant of Cecil, in the person of the present Earl of Salisbury.

That place of Theobalds became afterward a pet home of the King; he made great gardens there, stocked with all manner of trees and fruits: every great stranger in England must needs go to see the curious knots and mazes of flowers, and the vineries and shrubbery; but the palace and gardens are now gone. At last King Jamie gets to London, quartering at the Charter-house—where is now a school and a home of worn-out old pensioners (dear old Colonel Newcome died there!) within gunshot of the great markets by Smithfield;—and James is as vain as a boy of sleeping and lording it, at last, in a great capital of two realms that call him master.

Walter Raleigh.

I said that his mind had been poisoned against Raleigh;[1] that poison begins speedily to work. There are only too many at the King’s elbow who are jealous of the grave and courtly gentleman, now just turned of fifty, and who has packed into those years so much of high adventure; who has written brave poems; who has fought gallantly and on many fields; who has voyaged widely in Southern and Western seas; who has made discovery of the Guianas; who has, on a time, befriended Spenser, and was mate-fellow with the gallant Sidney; who was a favorite of the great Queen; and whose fine speech, and lordly bearing, and princely dress made him envied everywhere, and hated by less successful courtiers. Possibly, too, Raleigh had made unsafe speeches about the chances of other succession to the throne. Surely he who wore his heart upon his sleeve, and loved brave deeds, could have no admiration for the poltroon of a King who had gone a hunting when the stains upon the scaffold on which his mother suffered were hardly dry. So it happened that Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of conspiring for the dethronement of the new King, and was brought to trial, with Cobham and others. The street people jeered at him as he passed, for he was not popular; he had borne himself so proudly with his exploits, and gold, and his eagle eye. But he made so noble a defence—so full—so clear—so eloquent—so impassioned, that the same street people cheered him as he passed out of court—but not to freedom. The sentence was death: the King, however, feared to put it to immediate execution. There was a show, indeed, of a scaffold, and the order issued. Cobham and Gray were haled out, and given last talks with an officiating priest, when the King ordered stay of proceedings: he loved such mummery. Raleigh went to the Tower, where for thirteen years he lay a prisoner; and they show now in the Tower of London the vaulted chamber that was his reputed (but doubtful) home, where he compiled, in conjunction with some outside friends—Ben Jonson among the rest—that ponderous History of the World, which is a great reservoir of facts, stated with all grace and dignity, but which, like a great many heavy, excellent books, is never read. The matter-of-fact young man remembers that Sir Walter Raleigh first brought potatoes and (possibly) tobacco into England; but forgets his ponderous History.

I may as well finish his story here and now, though I must jump forward thirteen and more years to accomplish it. At the end of that time the King’s exchequer being low (as it nearly always was), and there being rumors afloat of possible gold findings in Raleigh’s rich country of Guiana, the old knight, now in his sixty-seventh year, felt the spirit of adventure stirred in him by the west wind that crept through the gratings of his prison bringing tropical odors; and he volunteered to equip a fleet in company with friends, and with the King’s permission to go in quest of mines, to which he believed, or professed to believe, he had the clew. The permission was reluctantly granted; and poor Lady Raleigh sold her estate, as well as their beloved country home of Sherborne (in Dorset) to vest in the new enterprise.

But the fates were against it: winds blew the ships astray; tempests beat upon them; mutinies threatened; and in Guiana, at last, there came disastrous fights with the Spaniards.

Keymis, the second in command, and an old friend of Raleigh’s, being reproached by this latter in a moment of frenzy, withdraws and shoots himself; Raleigh’s own son, too, is sacrificed, and the crippled squadron sets out homeward, with no gold, and shattered ships and maddened crews. Storm overtakes them; there is mutiny; there is wreck; only a few forlorn and battered hulks bring back this disheartened knight. He lands in his old home of Devon—is warned to flee the wrath that will fall upon him in London; but as of old he lifts his gray head proudly, and pushes for the capital to meet his accusers. Arrived there, he is made to know by those strong at court that there is no hope, for he has brought no gold; and yielding to friendly entreaties he makes a final effort at escape. He does outwit his immediate guards and takes to a little wherry that bears him down the Thames: a half-day more and he would have taken wings for France. But the sleuth-hounds are on his track; he is seized, imprisoned, and in virtue of his old sentence—the cold-hearted Bacon making the law for it—is brought to the block.

He walks to the scaffold with serene dignity—greets old friends cheerfully—dies cheerfully, and so enters on the pilgrimage he had set forth in his cumbrous verse:—

“There the blessed paths we’ll travel,

Strow’d with rubies thick as gravel;

Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,

High walls of coral and pearly bowers.

From thence to Heaven’s bribeless hall,

Where no corrupted voices brawl;

No conscience molten into gold,

No forg’d accuser bought or sold,

No cause deferr’d, no vain-spent Journey,

For there Christ is the King’s Attorney,

Who pleads for all without degrees,

And He hath angels, but no fees.

And when the grand twelve-million jury

Of our sins, with direful fury,

Against our souls black verdicts give,

Christ pleads his death and then we live.”

Again to his wife, in a last letter from his prison, he writes:—

“You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead; and my counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess: let them go to the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and with a heart like yourself.

“I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not hide yourself many days; but, by your labors seek to help my miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it: for, know it, my dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own respect, despiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep), and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it in Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother.

“My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true God hold you both in his arms.”

It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Raleigh; the poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine; but they did have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought. They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till long after he had gone: they were only occasional pieces,[2] coming to the light fitfully under stress of mind—a trail of fire-sparks, as we may say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate fortunes.

Even his History was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent themselves in the blaze of battles—in breasting stormy seas that washed shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with every sunrise.

And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of the Orinoco, its lawless gallantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long captivities—it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns, and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full of the largest pathos.

When you read Charles Kingsley’s story of Westward, Ho! (which you surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has written relating to Raleigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the true Elizabethan humor—putting fiery love and life into his writing; the roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down, splashes of storm-driven brine.

Nigel and Harrison.

In going back now to the earlier years of King James’ reign, I shall make no apology for calling attention to that engaging old story of the Fortunes of Nigel. I know it is the fashion with many of the astute critics of the day to pick flaws in Sir Walter, and to expatiate on his blunders and shortcomings; nevertheless, I do not think my readers can do better—in aiming to acquaint themselves with this epoch of English history—than to read over again Scott’s representation of the personality and the surroundings of the pedant King. There may be errors in minor dates, errors of detail; but the larger truths respecting the awkwardness and the pedantries of the first Stuart King, and respecting the Scotch adventurers who hung pressingly upon his skirts, and the lawless street scenes which in those days did really disturb the quietude of the great metropolis, are pictured with a liveliness which will make them unforgetable. Macaulay says that out of the gleanings left by historic harvesters Scott has made “a history scarce less valuable than theirs.” Nor do I think there is in the Fortunes of Nigel a deviation from the truth (of which many must be admitted) so extravagant and misleading as Mr. Freeman’s averment, that in Ivanhoe “there is a mistake in every line.” There are small truths and large truths; and the competent artist knows which to seize upon. Titian committed some fearful anachronisms, and put Venetian stuffs upon Judean women; Balthasar Denner, on the other hand, painted with minute truthfulness every stubby hair in a man’s beard, and no tailor could have excepted to his button-holes: nobody knows Denner; Titian reigns.

Among those whom Scott placed under tribute for much of his local coloring was a gossipy, kindly clergyman, William Harrison[3] by name, who was born close by Bow Lane, in London, who studied at Westminster, at Oxford, and Cambridge (as he himself tells us), and who had a parish in Radwinter, on the northern borders of Essex; who came to be a canon, finally, at Windsor; and who died ten years before James came to power. He tells us, in a delightfully quaint way, of all the simples which he grew in his little garden—of the manner in which country houses were builded, and their walls white-washed—of the open chimney vents, and the smoke-burnished rafters. “And yet see the change,” he says, “for when our houses were builded of willow, then had we oken men; but now that our houses are come to be made of oke, our men are not onlie become willow, but a great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among us, altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration.”

When the old parson gets upon the subject of dress he waxes eloquent; nor was he without fullest opportunities for observation, having been for much time private chaplain to the Earl of Cobham.

“Oh, how much cost,” he says, “is bestowed now-a-daies upon our bodies, and how little upon our soules! How many sutes of apparel hath the one, and how little furniture hath the other! How curious, how nice are the men and women, and how hardlie can the tailer please them in making things fit for their bodies. How many times must they be sent back againe to him that made it. I will say nothing of our heads, which sometimes are polled, sometimes curled, or suffered to grow at length like woman’s locks, manie times cut off above or under the ears, round, as by a wooden dish. Neither will I meddle with our varieties of beards, of which some are shaven from the chin like those of the Turks, not a few cut like to the beard of Marquess Otto; some made round, like a rubbing brush, others with a pique devant (O fine fashion!).

“In women, too, it is much to be lamented that they doo now far exceed the lightness of our men, and such staring attire as in times past was supposed meet for none but light housewives onelie, is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons. What should I say of their doublets with pendant pieces on the brest, full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundrie colors, I have met with some of these trulles in London, so disguised, that it hath passed my skill to discerne whether they were men or women.”

If this discerning old gentleman had shot his quill along our sidewalks, I think it would have punctured a good deal of bloat, and stirred up no little bustle. The King himself had a great liking for fine dress in others, though he was himself a sloven. Lord Howard, a courtier, writes to a friend who is hopeful of preferment:

“I would wish you to be well trimmed; get a new Jerkin well bordered, and not too short: the King liketh it flowing. Your ruff should be well stiffened and bushy. The King is nicely heedful of such points. Eighteen servants were lately discharged, and many more will be discarded who are not to his liking in these matters.” And again, speaking of a favorite, he says:—“Carr hath changed his tailors, and tiremen many times, and all to please the Prince, who laugheth at the long-grown fashion of our young courtiers, and wisheth for change everie day.”

A London Bride.

One other little bit of high light upon the every-day ways of London living, in the early years of King James, we are tempted to give. It comes out in the private letter of a new-married lady, who was daughter and heiress of that enormously rich merchant, Sir John Spencer, who was Lord Mayor of London; and who, in Elizabeth’s time (as well as James’), lived in Crosby Hall, still standing in the thick of London city, near to where Thread and Needle Street, at its eastern end, abuts upon Bishopsgate. Every voyaging American should go to see this best type of domestic architecture of the fifteenth century now existing in London; and it will quicken his interest in the picturesque old pile to know that Richard III., while Duke of Gloucester, passed some critical days and nights there, and that for some years it was the home of Sir Thomas More. The Spencer heiress, however—of whom we began to make mention—brightened its interior at a later day; there were many suitors for her hand; among them a son of Lord Compton—not looked upon with favor by the rich merchant—and concealing his advances under the disguise of a baker’s boy, through which he came to many stolen interviews, and at last (as tradition tells) was successful enough to trundle away the heiress, covertly, in his baker’s barrow. Through the good offices of Queen Elizabeth, who stood god-mother to the first child, difficulties between father and son-in-law were healed; and when, later, by the death of Sir John Spencer, the bridegroom was assured of the enormous wealth inherited by his bride, he was—poor man—nearly crazed.

Among the curative processes for his relief may be reckoned the letter from his wife to which I have made allusion, and which runs thus:—

“My sweet Life, I pray and beseech you to grant me the sum of £2,600 [equivalent to some $30,000 now] quarterly: also, besides, £600 quarterly for charities, of which I will give no account. Also, I would have 3 horses for my own saddle, that none shall dare to lend or borrow. Also; 2 gentlewomen (lest one should be sick)—seeing it is an indecent thing for a gentlewoman to stand mumping alone, when God hath blessed the Lord and Lady with a great Estate: Also, when I ride, a hunting or a hawking, I would have them attend: so, for either of those said women there must be a horse.

“Also, I would have 6 or 8 gentlemen; I will have my two coaches—one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fair horses, and a coach for my women lined with cloth, and laced with gold;—otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. Thereafter, my desire is that you defray all charges for me, and beside my allowance, I would have 20 gowns of apparel a year—six of them excellent good ones. Also, I would have to put in my purse £2,000 or so—you to pay my debts. And seeing I have been so reasonable, I pray you do find my children apparel, and their schooling, and all my servants, men and women, with wages. Also, I must have £6,000 to buy me jewels, and £4,000 to buy me a gold chain. Also, my desire is, that you would pay your debts—build up Ashley House, and lend no money as you love God! When you be an Earl [as he was afterward in Charles I.’s time] I pray you to allow £2,000 more than I now desire and double attendance.”

Happy husband!

Ben Jonson again.

We must not forget our literature; and what has become of our friend Ben Jonson in these times? He is hearty and thriving; he has written gratulatory and fulsome verses to the new sovereign. He is better placed with James than even with Elizabeth. If his tragedy of “Sejanus” has not found a great success, he has more than made up the failing by the brilliant masques he has written. The pedantic King loves their pretty show of classicism, which he can interpret better than his courtiers. He battens, too, upon the flattery that is strown with a lavish hand:—

“Never came man more longed for, more desired,

And being come, more reverenced, lov’d, admired.”[4]

This is the strain; no wonder that the poet comes by pension; no wonder he has “commands,” with goodly fees, to all the fêtes in the royal honor. Yet he is too strong and robust and learned to be called a mere sycophant. The more I read of the literary history of those days the more impressed I am by the predominance of Ben Jonson;—a great, careless, hard-living, hard-drinking, not ill-natured literary monarch. His strength is evidenced by the deference shown him—by his versatility; now some musical masque sparkling with little dainty bits which a sentimental miss might copy in her album or chant in her boudoir; and this, matched or followed by some labored drama full of classic knowledge, full of largest wordcraft, snapping with fire-crackers of wit, loaded with ponderous nuggets of strong sense, and the whole capped and booted with prologue and epilogue where poetic graces shine through proudest averments of indifference—of scorn of applause—of audacious self-sufficiency.

It was some fifteen years after James’ coming to power that Ben Jonson made his memorable Scotch journey—perhaps out of respect for his forebears, who had gone, two generations before, out of Annandale—perhaps out of some lighter caprice. In any event it would have been only a commonplace foot-journey of a middle-aged man, well known over all Britain as poet and dramatist, with no special record of its own, except for a visit of a fortnight which he made, in the north country, to Drummond of Hawthornden:—this made it memorable. For this Drummond was a note-taker; he was a smooth but not strong poet; was something proud of his Scotch lairdship; lived in a beautiful home seated upon a crag that lifts above the beautiful valley of Eskdale; its picturesque irregularities of tower and turret are still very charming, and Eskdale is charming with its wooded walks, cliffs, pools, and bridges; Roslin Castle is near by, and Roslin Chapel, and so is Dalkeith.

The tourist of our time can pass no pleasanter summer’s day than in loiterings there and thereabout. Echoes of Scott’s border minstrelsy beat from bank to bank. Poet Drummond was proud to have poet Jonson as a guest, and hospitably plied him with “strong waters;” under the effusion Jonson dilated, and Drummond, eagerly attentive, made notes. These jottings down, which were not voluminous, and which were not published until after both parties were in their graves, have been subject of much and bitter discussion, and relate to topics lying widely apart. There is talk of Petrarch and of Queen Elizabeth—of Marston and of Overbury—of Drayton and Donne—of Shakespeare (all too little)—of King James and Petronius—of Jonson’s “shrew of a wife” and of Sir Francis Bacon; and there are more or less authentic stories of Spenser and Raleigh and Sidney. Throughout we find the burly British poet very aggressive, very outspoken, very penetrative and fearless: and we find his Scotch interviewer a little overawed by the other’s audacities, and not a little resentful of his advice to him—to study Quintillian.

An Italian Reporter.

It was in the very year of Ben Jonson’s return from the north that a masque of his—“Pleasure is Reconciled to Virtue”—was represented at Whitehall; and it so happens that we have a lively glimpse of this representation from the note-book of an Italian gentleman who was chaplain to Pietro Contarini, then ambassador from Venice, and who was living at Sir Pindar’s home in Bishopsgate Street (a locality still kept in mind by a little tavern now standing thereabout called “Sir Pindar’s Head”).

This report of Busino, the Italian gentleman of whom I spoke, about his life in London, was buried in the archives of Venice, until unearthed about twenty years since by an exploring Englishman.[5] So it happens, that in this old Venetian document we seem to look directly through those foreign eyes, closed for two hundred and seventy years, upon the play at Whitehall.

“For two hours,” he says, “we were forced to wait in the Venetian box, very hot and very crowded. Then the Lord Chamberlain came up, and wanted to add another, who was a greasy Spaniard.”

This puts Busino in an ill humor (there was no good-will between Italy and Spain in those days); but he admires the women—“all so many queens.”

“There were some very lovely faces, and at every moment my companions kept exclaiming: ‘Oh, do look at this one!’ ‘Oh, do see that other!’ ‘Whose wife is this?’ ‘And that pretty one near her, whose daughter is she?’ [Curious people!] Then the King came in and took the ambassador to his royal box, directly opposite the stage, and the play began at 10 P.M.”

There was Bacchus on a car, followed by Silenus on a barrel, and twelve wicker-flasks representing very lively beer bottles, who performed numerous antics; then a moving Mount Atlas, as big as the stage would permit; scores of classic affectations and astonishing mythologic mechanism; and at last, with a great bevy of pages, twelve cavaliers in masques—the Prince Charles (afterward Charles I.) being chief of the revellers.

“These all choose partners and dance every kind of dance—every cavalier selecting his lady. After an hour or two of this, they, being tired, began to flag;” whereat—says the chaplain—“the choleric King James got impatient and shouted out from his box, ‘Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you all—dance!’”

What a light this little touch of the old gentleman’s choleric spirit throws upon the court manners of that time!

Then Buckingham, the favorite, whom Scott introduces in Nigel as Steenie—comes forward to placate the King, and cuts a score of lofty capers with so much grace and agility as not only to quiet the wrathy monarch but to delight everybody. Afterward comes the banquet, at which his most sacred majesty gets tipsy, and amid a general smashing of Venetian glass, continues the Italian gentleman, “I went home, very tired, at two o’clock in the morning.”

Ah, if we could only unearth some good old play-going chaplain’s account of how Shakespeare appeared—of his dress—of his voice—and with what unction of manner he set before the little audience at the Globe, or Blackfriars, his part of Old Adam (which there is reason to believe he took), in his own delightful play of “As You Like It.” What would we not give to know the very attitude, and the wonderful pity in his look, with which he spoke to his young master, Orlando:—

“Oh, my sweet master, what make you here?

Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?

Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely

Envenoms him, that bears it!”

Shakespeare and the Globe.

Neither our Italian friend, however, nor Ben Jonson have given us any such glimpse as we would like to have of that keen-witted Warwickshire actor and playwright who, in the early years of James’ reign, is living off and on in London; having bought, within a few years—as the records tell us—a fine New Place in Stratford, and has won great favor with that King Jamie, who with all his pedantry knows a good thing when he sees it, or hears it. Indeed, there is some warrant for believing that the King wrote a commendatory letter to the great dramatist, of which Mr. Black, in our time, makes shadowy use in that Shakespearean romance of his,[6] you may have encountered. The novelist gives us some very charming pictures of the Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch and engaging; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon; and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that have hampered him; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that belonged to his treatment of things among the Hebrides. But to return to “Judith’s father”—he is part proprietor of the Globe Theatre, taking in lots of money (old cronies say) in that way; was honored by the Queen, too, before her death, and had written that “Merry Wives of Windsor,” tradition says, to show Queen Bess how the Fat Falstaff would carry his great hulk as a lover.

We might meet this Shakespeare at that Mermaid Tavern we spoke of; but should look out for him more hopefully about one of the playhouses. Going from the Mermaid, supposing we were putting up there in those days, we should strike across St. Paul’s Churchyard, and possibly taking Paul’s Walk, and so down Ludgate Hill; and thence on, bearing southerly to Blackfriars; which locality has now its commemoration in the name of Playhouse Yard, and is in a dingy quarter, with dingy great warehouses round it. Arrived there we should learn, perhaps by a poster on the door, that the theatre would not open till some later hour. Blackfriars[7] was a private theatre, roofed over entirely and lighted with candles; also, through Elizabeth’s time, opening generally on Sundays—that being a popular day—hours being chosen outside of prayer or church-time; and this public dramatic observance of Sunday was only forbidden by express enactment after James came to the throne. At her palace, and with her child-players, Sunday was always Queen Elizabeth’s favorite day.

This Blackfriars was at only a little remove down the Thames from that famous Whitefriars region of which there is such melodramatic account in Scott’s story of Nigel, where Old Trapbois comes to his wild death. If we went to the Globe Theatre, we should push on down to the river—near to a point where Blackfriars Bridge now spans it—then, a clear stream free from all bridges, save only London Bridge, which would have loomed, with its piles of houses, out of the water on our left. At the water-side we should take wherry (fare only one penny) and be sculled over to Southwark, landing at an open place—Bankside—near which was Paris Garden, where bear-baiting was still carried on with high kingly approval; and thereabout, on a spot now swallowed in a gulf of smoked and blackened houses—just about the locality where at a later day stood Richard Baxter’s Chapel, rose the octagonal walls of the Globe Theatre, in which Mr. Shakespeare was concerned as player and part proprietor. There should be a flag flying aloft and people lounging in, paying their two-pence, their sixpences, their shillings, or even their half-crowns—as they chose the commoner or the better places. Only the stage is roofed over; perhaps also a narrow space all round the walls; from all otherwheres within, one could look up straight into the murky sky of London. There is apple-eating, nut-cracking, and some vender of pamphlets bawling “Buy a new booke;” such a one perhaps as that Horne Booke of Gulls—which I told you of, written by Dekker—would have been a favorite for such venders. Or, possibly through urgence of the Court Chamberlain, King James’ Counterblaste to Tobacco may be put on sale there, to mend manners; or Joshua Sylvester’s little poem to the same end, entitled Tobacco battered and the Pipes shattered about their Eares that idly idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, by a Volley of hot shot, thundered from Mount Helicon.

“How juster will the Heavenly God,

Th’ Eternal, punish with infernal rod

In Hell’s dark furnace, with black fumes to choak

Those that on Earth will still offend in Smoak.”

But hot as this sort of shot might have been, we may be sure that some fast fellows, the critics and æsthetes of those days, will have their place on the stage, sprawling there upon the edge, before the actors appear; criticising players and audience and smoking their long pipes; may be taking a hand at cards, and if very “swell,” tossing the cards over to people in the pit when once their game is over—a showy and arrogant largess.

Perhaps Ben Jonson will come swaggering in, having taken a glass, or two, very likely, or even three, in the tap-room of the Tabard Tavern—the famous Tabard of Chaucer’s tales—which is within practicable drinking distance; and Will Shakespeare, if indeed there, may greet him across two benches with, “Ah, Ben,” and he—tipsily in reply, with “Ah, my good fellow, Will.” Those prim young men, Beaumont and Fletcher, who are just now pluming their wings for such dramatic flights as these two older men have made, may also be there. And the play will open with three little bursts of warning music; always a prologue with a first representation; and it may chance that the very one we have lighted upon, is some special exhibit of that great military spectacle of “Henry V.” which we know, and all the times between have known; and it may be that this Shakespeare, being himself author and in a sense manager of these boards, may come forward to speak the prologue himself; how closely we would have eyed him, and listened:—

“Pardon, gentles all;

The flat, unraiséd spirit, that hath dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object: Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? or may we cram

Within this wooden O, the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,

Into a thousand parts divide one man;

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth,

For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times;

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass.”

And then the play begins and we see them all: Gloucester and the brave king, and Bedford, and Fluellen, and the pretty Kate of France (by some boy-player), and Nym, and Pistol, and Dame Quickly; and the drums beat, and the roar of battle breaks and rolls away—as only Shakespeare’s words can make battles rage; and the French Kate is made Queen, and so the end comes.

All this might have happened; I have tried to offend against no historic data of places, or men, or dates in this summing up. And from the doors of the Globe, where we are assailed by a clamor of watermen and linkboys, we go down to the river’s edge—scarce a stone’s-throw distant—and take our wherry, on the bow of which a light is now flaming, and float away in the murky twilight upon that great historic river—watching the red torch-fires, kindling one by one along the Strand shores, and catching the dim outline of London houses—the London of King James I.—looming through the mists behind them.

In our next chapter I shall have somewhat more to say of the Stratford man—specially of his personality; and more to say of King James, and of his English Bible.

CHAPTER II.

We have had our glimpse of the first (English) Stuart King, as he made his shambling way to the throne—beset by spoilsmen; we had our glimpse, too, of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the magic-lantern of Scott at the toilet and the draggled feathers of the pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the Scotch Nigel adventured; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose silken dresses whisked along those balusters of Crosby Hall, which brides of our day may touch reverently now; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale; and thereafter we sauntered down Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside and the Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o’ day with Ben Jonson; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes; and had a glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe Theatre.

Gosson and Other Puritans.

There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a certain Stephen Gosson[8]—well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his fellows—who had received a university education, who had written delicate pastorals and other verse, which—with many people—ranked him with Spenser and Sidney; who had written plays too, but who, somehow conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses to extremest Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against “Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”—as he called them—as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day I cited. He had called his discourse, “pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable for all that will follow Vertue.” He represented the Puritan feeling—which was growing in force—in respect to poetry and the drama; and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best loved and trusted emissaries of Satan.

But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers;—not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603—he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties—partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, he issued a proclamation—“Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church.”

Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, “moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original.”

King James’ Bible.

There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though—for anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision—it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.

It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that “it should be done by the best learned in both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the “most High, and Mighty Prince James” (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense; after thanking him as “principal mover and author of the work,” the dedication exuberantly declares that “the hearts of all your loyal and religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little tractate of his—the Basilikon Doron—not written for publication (though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions; and—saving some scornings of the “vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines”—is written in a spirit which might be safely commended to later British Princes.

“When yee reade the Scripture [says the King] reade it with a sanctified and chast hart; admire reverentlie such obscure places as ye understand not, blaming only your own capacitie; reade with delight the plaine places, and study carefully to understand those that are somewhat difficile: preasse to be a good textuare; for the Scripture is ever the best interpreter of itselfe.”

Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King James’ money, none from the royal exchequer; which indeed from the King’s disorderly extravagances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low. The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of book-makers who were concerned with the printing and selling of the new Bible.

When the business of revision actually commenced it is hard to determine accurately; but it was not till the year 1611—eight years after the Hampton Conference—that an edition was published by printer Barker (who, or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version “appointed (by assemblage of Bishops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the great Bible of the English-speaking world—then, and thence-forward. And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? Their names are all of record: and yet if I were to print them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of the twoscore.[9] You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this time was writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty, and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Robert Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book The Anatomy of Melancholy—then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury—both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,[10] though he came to be Dean of St. Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may—and ought to know; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Immortality of the Soul[11] in strains that warrant our citing a few quatrains:—

“At first, her mother Earth she holdeth dear,

And doth embrace the world and worldly things:

She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,

And mounts not up with her celestial wings.

“Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught

That with her heavenly nature doth agree;

She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,

She cannot in this world contented be:

“For who, did ever yet, in honor, wealth,

Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?

Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health?

Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind?

“Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall,

Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay;

She lights on that and this, and tasteth all,

But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away!”

This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.

And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view—which is our stand-point to-day—there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good reason to believe that—on literary lines—any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that will mend its science—that will mend its archæology—that will mend its history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out—freighted with Christian doctrine—over all lands where Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one—in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one—it is reasonably to be presumed—can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the “higher criticism;” and no one will be henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions.

And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,[12] at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an interpolation—that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself)—“For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”

And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes; no matter what critical scholarship may do in amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their strong, old English current—burdened with tender memories—murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come—“or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.”

The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak—whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight—is overgrown, unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its support—that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe?

It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “King James’ Version” do not lie altogether in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in Jacobean felicities; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure have brought their pleasant reverberations of lingual sound all the way down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif.

A few facts about the printing and publishing of the early English Bibles it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the fatherly edicts against Bible-reading and Bible-owning in the time of Henry VIII.; but the reign of his son, Edward VI., was a golden epoch for the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the throne, fifty editions—principally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s versions—were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged in their manufacture.

Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth in ghastly wood-cut “the burning of Mr. John Rogers at the Stake, in Smithfield.” Elizabeth was coy; she set a great many prison-doors open; and when a courtier said, “May it please your Majesty, there be sundry other prisoners held in durance, and it would much comfort God’s people that they be set free.” She asked, “Whom?” And the good Protestant said, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she—young as she was—showed her monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.”

But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through Cheapside—had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and said she should “oft read that holy book”—which was easy to say, and becoming.

In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley—that John Bodley whose more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford.

In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood—of Elizabeth, on the title-page—of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year.

It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin, in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743.

But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them all, who was born upon the Avon.

Shakespeare.

I have tried—I will confess it now—to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies—whether places, or writers, or sovereigns—I said to myself—when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written—we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying—standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles—this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle—brimful of life—with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal—that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy—apart in his dim tower—piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony.

These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse—allusion—is of such weight—has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson;—not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted—but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship.

If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James—names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best—I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.

And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pilgrimage which he told us of in such winning numbers, make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the “Faërie Queene,” they are phantasmic; we may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely—they have no flesh and blood texture: and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the best-drawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well—Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters appear, but because none of them have that vital roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities.

We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us—maybe their pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know.

Shakespeare’s Youth.

And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue?

And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men—poets and dramatists—who belonged to his time, and who—with a pleasant egoism—let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family “wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless—aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted—to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him; he ran out of sight of them all.

He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born—his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers—whether in wool, meats, or gloves—and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family—in the female line[13]—toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;—hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them; wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges of coal and lumber swaying with the idle currents that swish among the sedges at the banks.

On the north, toward Warwick, are the Welcombe hills, here and there tufted with great trees, which may have mingled their boughs, in some early time, with the skirts of the forest of Arden; and from these heights, looking southwest, one can see the packed gray and red roofs of the town, the lines of lime-trees, the elms and the willows of the river’s margin, out of which rises the dainty steeple of Stratford church; while beyond, the eye leaps over the hazy hollows of the Red-horse valley, and lights upon the blue rim of hills in Gloucestershire, known as the Cotswolds (which have given name to one of the famous breeds of English sheep). More to the left, and nearer to a south line of view, crops up Edgehill (near to Pilot-Marston), an historic battle-field—wherefrom Shakespeare, on his way to London may have looked back—on spire, and alder copse, and river—with more or less of yearning. To the right, again, and more westerly than before, and on the hither side of the Red-horse valley and plain, one can catch sight of the rounded thickets of elms and of orcharding where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Thence Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hathaway, she being well toward the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a family at this time, we cannot now say; nor could his father-in-law tell then; on which score there was—as certain traditions run—some vain demurral. He may have been associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover; doubtless was; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling; doubtless was at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories too—of lesser authenticity—that he was over-familiar with the game in the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner. We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and its delightful park, and picturesque mossy walls—dappled with patches of shadow and with ivy leaves—look charmingly innocent of any harm their master could have done to William Shakespeare; but certain it is that the neighborhood grew too warm for him; and that he set off one day (being then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune.

Family Relations.

His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact—and it may as well be said here—they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people—grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little—perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Oh, my love,

Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

Thou art not conquered; Beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,

And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.

Why art thou yet so fair?”

His two daughters lived to maturity—both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was—so far as known—watchful and tender of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable.

It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother—both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and with whom—specially the mother—most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.

But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause—or both—may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people.

His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:—

“Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;”

or those others, telling how the gentle day

“Dapples the drowsy East with spots of gray.”

Again, there was delightful outlook for

“——a bank whereon the wild thyme blows

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;”

or, perhaps it was the

“Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves”

that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which,

Like prisoners overgrown with hair

Put forth disordered twigs;

and these flanked by some

“——even mead, which erst brought sweetly forth

The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover.”

What a wondrous light upon all the landscape along all the courses of his country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to Stratford—past Long Compton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Royal George”)—past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks, and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose shimmering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows clearly distinguishable, and throwing afternoon shadows on the silvery stretch of the Avon; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge, over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the twilight; coming thus, by a traveller’s chance, into the court of the Red-Horse Tavern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book” (its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was quartered twenty odd years before, and was occupying, for the nonce, the very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, made a sceptre of the poker, and enjoyed the royalties of “mine inn.”

Shakespeare in London.

But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there? We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established in the city; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to the favor of the Queen. He has no literary backing of the colleges, or of degrees, or of learned associates; nay, not being so high placed, or so well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their heads at mention of him.

But he has heard the strolling players; perhaps has journeyed up in their trail; he has read broadsides, very likely, from London; we may be sure that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went courting to the Hathaway cottage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with them; precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows from the universities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing plays of their own; but lacking Shakespeare’s instinct as to what will take hold of the popular appetite, or rather—let us say—what will touch the human heart.

There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight.

Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs:

“Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep,

To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,

And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;

Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear.

“For there, his smell, with others being mingled,

The hot-scent snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,

Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled

With much ado, the cold fault clearly out;

Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies

As if another chase were in the skies.

“By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill,

Stands on his hinder legs with listening fear,

To hearken if his foes pursue him still;

Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear;

And now his grief may be comparéd well

To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.”

It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought.

I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:—

“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registered upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of Death;

When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time,

The endeavor of this present breath may buy

That honor, which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge

And make us heirs of all Eternity!”

Work and Reputation.

And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His Venus and Adonis[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his Lucrece; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

He had no coterie behind him; he was hail-fellow with Jonson; probably knew Peele and Marlowe well; undoubtedly knew Drayton; he went to the Falcon and the Mermaid; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that he ever saw much of Raleigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years after he came to London. It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the Faery Queene knew him at all. Sidney he probably never saw; nor did he ever go, so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil.

His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere scholastic learning—apprehending everywhere, in places where studious ones were blind. I can imagine that Oxford men—just up in town or those who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show of learning as he made;—call it cheap erudition—call it result of cramming—as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah, what a gift of cramming! What a gift of apprehension! What a swift march over the hedges that cramp schools! What a flight, where other men walked, and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways of knowledge and of wisdom!

Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar things, coarse things—things we want to skip and do skip—things that make us wonder if he ever wrote them; perhaps some which in the mendings and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there; and yet he was capable of saying coarse things; he did have a shrewd eye for the appetites of the groundlings; he did look on all sides, and into all depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out; and even his commonest utterances, have, after all, a certain harmony, though in lowest key, with the general drift. He is not always, as some of his dramatic compeers were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high.

Then, too, like Chaucer—his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy—he steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever in human history he can find them, to work into his purposes. But even the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands.

As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare talks of

“That undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,”

and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.

“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers—Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized—you and I perhaps; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp—so full—so suggestive—so marrowy—so keen—so poignant—so enthralling.

No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape.

His Thrift and Closing Years.

Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd, thrifty man; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and sixpences that go into the till of the Globe Theatre; he makes money. Where he lived in London,[19] we do not definitely know; at one time, it is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,[20] but never ostentatiously; very likely sharing chambers with his brother Edmond, who was much time an actor there;[21] he buys a house and haberdasher’s shop somewhere near Blackfriars; and he had previously bought, with his savings—even before Queen Elizabeth was dead—a great house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying lands—a hundred acres at one time, and twenty and more at another. He has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road (on horseback probably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the boards; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins, to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own.

I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we could find even a two-page letter which he may have written to Ben Jonson, in London, telling how his time passed; but there is nothing—positively nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or so after his return to Stratford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his favorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of consequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon.

He died at the age of fifty-three. No descendant of his daughter Susanna is alive; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.[22] The great new home which he had built up in Stratford is torn down; scarce a vestige of it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward, where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative festival, is gone, root and branch.

Shakespeare—an old county guide-book tells us stolidly—is a name unknown in that region. Unknown! Every leaf of every tree whispers it; every soaring skylark makes a carol of it; and the memory of it flows out thence—as flows the Stratford river—down through all the green valley of the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out to farthest seas, whose “multitudinous waves” carry it to every shore.

CHAPTER III.

We were venturing upon almost sacred ground when—in our last chapter—we had somewhat to say of the so-called King James’ Bible; of how it came to bear that name; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of certain literary qualities belonging to it, which—however excellent other and possible future Bibles may be—will be pretty sure to keep it alive for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London; tracked him awhile there; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character; spared you the recital of a world of things—conjectural or eulogistic—which might be said of him; and finally saw him go back to his old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman—last of all his plays—and to die.

This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter—Shakespeare and the English Bible! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech, and who are eager to compass and enjoy its largest and keenest and simplest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants, and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary experimentation; but these twain furnish sufficient lingual armament for all new conquests in letters.

We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way—making a descriptive dash at some few of them—seeing the old pedant of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain.

Webster, Ford, and Others.

All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.

Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly—one time as “merchant tailor;” and there are other intimations that he may have held some church “clerkship;” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame[23] had slipped away from people’s knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dyce[24] wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopædic writing in declaring this dramatist to be “hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world.”