had borne a different aspect, for Cherlecote, whatever it may have been in the days of his own Sir Thomas, when he was gone, and for the last sixteen years of the life of Shakespeare, was as much as any house in England the seat of the Virtues, the Graces, and the Muses. I do not say that Shakespeare needs the testimony which such an acquaintanceship would have borne to his eminent merits; or that it would have been otherwise than honourable to Cherlecote at its best estate to have received such a man under its roof; but it could have been no discredit to either party had we found that past unkindnesses had been forgotten, and that he was received as a friend and neighbour by such persons as in his later days. formed the society at Cherlecote.

A word or two may be added to shew who they were.

Sir Thomas Lucy survived his lady five years, dying in 1600. He was succeeded by his son, another Sir Thomas, who enjoyed the estate not more than four or five years. This Sir Thomas was a scholar in that peculiar species of learning in which Shakespeare delighted; for we find him leaving, in his will," all his French and Italian books" to his son. He left a widow, who was originally Constance Kingsmill, a great heiress, who had been brought up in the family of Sir Francis Walsingham, where she was a companion of his daughter, the Stella of Spenser, who became the wife of Sir Philip Sidney, about the same time that Constance married the younger Sir Thomas Lucy. But that was the least of her merits. I have seen a manuscript account of this lady written by the wife of one of her descendants*, in which, among many high commendations, it is said that in the family of Walsingham she was noted for her "courteousness and decent sober

Mrs. Elizabeth Lucy, a daughter of Bevil Molesworth, Esquire. The original is in the possession of Robert Benson, Esquire, recorder of Salisbury, who descends from the Lucys.

carriage." This lady had Cherlecote after her husband's death, and there she brought up the large family committed to her care by her husband, consisting of six sons and four daughters. Her eldest son was another Sir Thomas Lucy who was nearly thirty years of age at the time of Shakespeare's death. He and his brothers were educated at the Universities and Inns of Court, and improved by foreign travel. He was himself returned in six several Parliaments for the county of Warwick; but, what is more to the present purpose, he was a scholar-one who delighted in literature, and whose table, as saith his epitaph, was always "open to the learned." The greatness of his library" is also spoken of by his contemporaries, and we may see him lying on his tomb in the church of Cherlecote, with a study of books at his head, and at his feet a managed horse, an exercise in which he greatly delighted. He was the intimate friend of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, as appears in Lord Herbert's account of his own life, and we may even trace him in the poetical literature of his time. John Davies of Hereford, in his Scourge of Folly, 1611, a book more to be admired for the many useful biographical notices which it contains than for the felicity of the verse, speaks of him thus:

The all-beloved and highly prized gem,
That in the court's brow like a diamond,
Or Hesperus in heaven, doth lighten them,
For men to see their way on glory's ground.

Richard, another of the sons, was a man of genius, as is evident from his being named one of the eighty-four who were to form an Academe Royal in the reign of James the First, to be associated in some way with the Order of the Garter. He was one of the earliest Baronets, and was the progenitor of the Lucys of Broxborne. William, another of the sons, became Bishop of St. David's.

Constance Lucy, the eldest daughter, died at ten years of age, in 1596, and had an epitaph in the church of the Holy Trinity, in the Minories:

Et quondam lucida, luce caret,

Ante annos Constans, humilis, mansueta, modesta.

In better taste is the epitaph in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, for Constance Whitney, a granddaughter of Sir Thomas and Constance Lucy, who appears to have been included in the family circle at Cherlecote. "This lady Lucy, her grandmother, so bred her since she was eight years old, as she excelled in all noble qualities becoming a virgin of so sweet a proportion of beauty and harmony of parts; she had all sweetness of manners answerable, a delightful sharpness of wit, an offenceless modesty of conversation, a singular respect and piety to her parents, but religious even to example. She departed this life most Christianly, at seventeen; dying the grief of all, but to her grandmother an unrecoverable loss, save in her expectation she shall not stay long after her, and the comfort of knowing whose she is, and where, in the resurrection, to meet her."*

Possibly, time may yet bring evidence to light which may shew that there was some connection between Shakespeare and this family, in the later period of the poet's life; when at Sir Thomas Lucy's table "bonus quisque gratissimus accubuit, presertim si theologiam sapuit, et musas imbibit; quarum ipse sitientior dubium an scientior fuerit." Lucys, it may be observed, have previously found little favor at the hands of the poet's friends.

The

Of the mode of the poet's life, while he was an inhabitant of Stratford, we cannot be said to know anything, if knowledge means certain information; that he was a schoolmaster,

* Munday's Stowe, fol. 1633, p. 779.

that he was an attorney's clerk, that he was a dealer in wool, that he was a butcher, are all either conjectural inferences from passages in his writings, or the traditions or recollections of persons whose relations ought to be sustained by some extraneous evidence before credit is given to them. That he passed several years at the Grammar School, at Stratford, hardly admits of a doubt. We know that he married before he was nineteen, and that his children were baptized at Stratford before he was twenty-one. There is also strong reason for believing that a great unkindness grew up between him and his powerful neighbours at Cherlecote, which, in the end, drove him from Stratford, and was the immediate cause of his settlement in London. So far our knowledge may be said to extend, but here it would seem to stop. We then enter on the region of conjecture and probabilities ; and of all these probabilities that seems, on the whole, most reasonable, that he, the eldest son of his father and the expectant heir of no very inconsiderable property, both on his father's and mother's side, was destined by his father to the same course of life which, we have reason to think, he himself pursued; that he was not brought up to any particular profession or employment, but was put in the dangerous position of one without regular occupation, yet, at the same time, without any very sufficient means of support. His marriage, therefore, would, in all probability, be distasteful to his parents, and compel him to think for himself of some means of subsistence. It would, at any rate, frustrate any intentions which his parents might have formed respecting him, and throw him very much on resources of his own; for, whatever else may be known of Anne Hathaway, there is no reason to believe that she brought with her any fortune. But when this marriage had taken place, and he remained for a few years at Stratford, it must be admitted that we know

nothing with any certainty of any employment in which he was engaged there.

This is unfortunate; and it has been usual for critics on the life of Shakespeare to complain of this want of information, and Steevens in particular has expressed his sense of it in terms so exaggerated, that one may wonder they should have been so often taken up and repeated. Persons accustomed to minute biographical research soon become sensible to the extreme difficulty of discovering particular incidents or positions in the lives of even eminent persons of time long past, when this eminence has lain only in the quiet walks of literature. Shakespeare is, in this respect, but in the state in which most of his contemporary poets are. Spenser, for instance, how little do we know of him; but with this difference, that we do know more concerning Shakespeare than we know of most of his contemporaries of the same class; so that instead of complaining that we know so little, we ought rather to rejoice that the inquiries of former biographers and the discoveries of more recent times have presented us with so much information concerning him. Small it is, but then how little is what we know of innumerable persons of whom we might wish to know more? If we had not had an Anthony Wood, what should we have known of any of the men of literature of his period?

He leaves Stratford, and becomes an actor in London. This we know, and a great deal more, as will at once be perceived by any one who will only glance at any of the many attempts which have been made to write biographies of the poet. But the year in which he left Stratford, that we do not know; yet we may gather from circumstances raising a high probability that it was in 1586 or 1587.

The next date which I deem unquestionable is 1592. In

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