filed lines." John-a-Combe never forgave the sharpness of the satire! And yet he bequeathed by his last will "To Mr. William Shakspere, five pounds." Aubrey tells the story with a difference :-" One time, as he was at the tavern at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed, he makes there this extemporary epitaph;" and then he gives the lines with a varia. tion, in which "vows" rhymes to "allows," instead of "sav'd" to "ingrav'd."

"

Of course, following out this second story, the family of John Combe resented the insult to the memory of their parent, who died in 1614; and yet an intimacy subsisted between them even till the death of Shakspere, for in his own will he bequeaths to the son of the usurer a remarkable token of personal regard, the badge of a gentleman :-"To Mr. Thomas Combe my sword." The whole story is a fabrication. Ten in the hundred was the cld name of opprobrium for one who lent money. To receive interest at all was called usury. That ten in the hundred was gone to the devil," was an old joke, that shaped itself into epigrams long before the death of John Combe; and in the Remains of Richard Brathwaite,' printed in 1618, we have the very epitaph assigned to Shakspere, with a third set of variations, given as a notable production of this voluminous writer: Upon one John Combe, of Stratford-upon-Avon, a notable usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had caused to be built in his Lifetime." The lie direct is given by the will of John Combe to this third version of the lines against him; for it directs that a convenient tomb shall be erected one year after his decease. John Combe was the neighbour and without doubt the friend of Shakspere. His house was within a short distance of New Place, being upon the site of the ancient College, and constructed in part out of the offices of that monastic establishment.* It was of John Combe and his

This fine old building, we regret to say, was taken down in 1799.

brother that Shakspere made a large purchase of land in 1602. The better tradition survived the memory of Rowe's and Aubrey's epitaph; and before the mansion was pulled down, the people of Stratford delighted to look upon the Hall where John Combe had listened to the "very ready and pleasant smooth wit" of his friend "the immortal Shakspere," as the good folks of Stratford always term their poet. It was here that the neighbours would talk of "pippins" of their "own graffing," of a fine "dish of leathercoats,"" how a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?"-"how a score of ewes now?" The poet had brought with him from London a few of the new mulberry plants. There was one at New Place, and one at the College. Which throve best? Should they ever raise silk-worms upon the leaves, and give a new manufacture to Stratford? The King was sanguine about the success of his mulberry-tree project, for he procured plants from France, and dispersed them through the kingdom; but they doubted. The poet planted his mulberry-tree for the ornament

Aubrey.

+ See Howe's Continuation of Stow's 'Chronicic,' p. 891.

of his "curious knotted garden;" little dreaming that his very fame in future times should accelerate its fall.

It would be something if we could now form an exact notion of the house in which Shakspere lived; of its external appearance, its domestic arrangements. Dugdale, speaking of Sir Hugh Clopton, who built the bridge at Stratford and repaired the chapel, says-" On the north side of this chapel was a fair house built of brick and timber, by the said Hugh, wherein he lived in his later days, and died." This was nearly a century before Shakspere bought the "fair house," which, in the will of Sir Hugh Clopton, is called "the great house." Theobald says that Shakspere, having repaired and modelled it to his own mind, changed the name to New Place." Malone holds that this is an error:-"I find from ancient documents that it was called New Place as early at least as 1565." The great house, having been sold out of the Clopton family, was purchased by Shakspere of William Underhill, Esq. Shakespere by his will left it to his daughter, Mrs. Hall, with remainder to her heirs male, or, in default, to her daughter Elizabeth and her heirs male, or the heirs male of his daughter Judith. Mrs. Hall died in 1649; surviving her husband fourteen years. There is little doubt that she occupied the hot se when Queen Henrietta Maria, in 1643, coming to Stratford in royal state with a large army, resided for three weeks under this roof. The property descended to her daughter Elizabeth, first married to Mr. Thomas Nash and afterwards to Sir Thomas Barnard. She dying without issue, New Place was sold in 1675, and was ultimately repurchased by the Clopton family. Sir Hugh Clopton, in the middle of the eighteenth century, resided there. The learned knight, according to some of the local historians, thoroughly repaired and beautified the place, and built a modern front to it. But it is evident, from recent excavations, that he did much more. Malone says that he "pulled down our poet's house, and built one more elegant on the same spot." After the death of Sir Hugh, in 1751, it was sold to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, in 1753.

The total destruction of New Place in 1757, by its new possessor, is difficult to account for upon any ordinary principles of action. Malone thus relates the story:-"The Rev. Mr. Gastrell, a man of large fortune, resided in it but a few years, in consequence of a disagreement with the inhabitants of Stratford. Every house in that town that is let or valued at more than 40s. a-year is assessed by the overseers, according to its worth and the ability of the occupier, to pay a monthly rate toward the maintenance of the poor. As Mr. Gastrell resided part of the year at Lichfield, he thought he was assessed too highly; but being very properly compelled by the magistrates of Stratford to pay the whole of what was levied on him, on the principle that his house was occupied by his servants in his absence, he peevishly declared that that house should never be assessed again; and soon afterwards pulled it down, sold the materials, and left the town. Wishing, as it should seem, to be damn'd to everlasting fame,' he had some time before cut down Shakspeare's celebrated mulberry-tree, to save himself the trouble of showing it to those whose admiration of our great poet led them to visit the poetic ground on which it

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stood." The cutting down of the mulberry-tree seems to have been regarded as a great offence in Mr. Gastrell's own generation. His wife was a sister of Johnson's correspondent, Mrs. Aston. After the death of Mr. Gastrell, his widow resided at Lichfield; and in 1776, Boswell, in company with Johnson, dined with the sisters. Boswell on this occasion says "I was not informed, till afterwards, that Mrs. Gastrell's husband was the clergyman who, while he lived at Stratfordupon-Avon, with Gothic barbarity cut down Shakspeare's mulberry-tree, and, as Dr. Johnson told me, did it to vex his neighbours. His lady, I have reason to believe on the same authority, participated in the guilt of what the enthusiasts of our immortal bard deem almost a species of sacrilege." The mulberry-tree was cut down in 1756; was sold for firewood; and the bulk of it was purchased by a Mr. Thomas Sharp, of Stratford-upon-Avon, clock and watch maker, who made a solemn affidavit, some years afterwards, that out of a sincere veneration for the memory of its celebrated planter he had the greater part of it conveyed to his own premises, and worked it into curious toys and useful articles. The destruction of the mulberry-tree, which the previous possessor of New Place used to show with pride and veneration, enraged the people of Stratford; and Mr. Wheler tells us that he remembers to have heard his father say that, when a boy, he assisted in the revenge of breaking the reverend destroyer's windows. The hostilities were put an end to by the Rev. Mr. Gastrell quitting Stratford in 1757; and, upon the principle of doing what he liked with his own, pulling the house to the ground.

We may charitably believe, not only that this reverend person had no enthusiastic reverence for the spot hallowed by associations with the memory of Shakspere; but that he thought nothing of Shakspere in the whole course of his proceedings. He bought a house, and paid for it. He wished to enjoy it in quiet. People with whom he could not sympathise intruded upon him to see the gardens and the house. In the gardens was a noble mulberry-tree. Tradition said it was planted by Shakspere; and the professional enthusiasts of Shakspere, the Garricks and the Macklins, had sat under its shade, during the cccupation of one who felt that there was a real honour in the ownership of such a piece. The Rev. Mr. Gastreil wanted the house and the gardens to himself. He ad that strong notion of the exclusive rights of property which belongs to most Englishmen, and especially to ignorant Englishmen. Mr. Gastrell was an ignorant man, though a clergyman. We have seen his diary, written upon a visit to Scotland three years after the pulling down of New Place. His journey was connected with some electioneering intrigues in the Scotch boroughs. He is a stranger in Scotland, and he goes into some of its most romantic districts. The scenery makes Lo impression upon him, as may be imagined; but he is scandalized beyond measure when he meets with a bad dinner, and a rough lodging. He has just literature enough to know the name of Shakspere; but in passing through Forres and Glamis he has not the slightest association with Shakspere's Macbeth. A Captain Gordon informs his vacant mind upon some abstruse subjects, as to which we have the following record:-" He assures me that the Duncan murdered at Forres was the same person that Shakspeare writes of." There scarcely requires any further

evidence of the prosaic character of his mind; and if there be some truth in the axiom of Shakspere, that

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,"

we hold, upon the same principle, that the man who speaks in this literal way of the "person that Shakspere writes of," was a fit man to root up Shakspere's mulberry-tree; pull down the house which had some associations with the mcre ancient structure in which the author of some of the greatest productions of the human intellect had lived and died; and feel not the slightest regret in abandoning the gardens which the matchless man had cultivated.

It is a singular fact that no drawings or prints exist of New Place as Shakspere left it, or at any period before the new house was built by Sir Hugh Clopton. It is a mole singular fact that although Garrick had been there only fourteen years before the destruction. visiting the place with a feeling of veneration that might have led him and others to preserve some memorial of it, there is no trace whatever existing of

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what New Place was before 1757. The wood-cut here given is a fac-simile of an engraving, first published by Malone, and subsequently appended to the variorum editions, which is thus described :-" New Place, from a drawing in the margin of an Ancient Survey, made by order of Sir George Carew (afterwards Baron Carew of Clopton, and Earl of Totnes), and found at Clopton, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1786." A person resident at Stratford at the period mentioned as that of the finding of the drawing-Poet Jordan, as he was called-an ignorant person, but ready enough to impose upon antiquarian credulity-an instrument perhaps in the hands of others-he sent to Malone this drawing of New Place from the margin of an ancient survey. If it was a survey found at Clopton, it was a survey of the Clopton property in the possession of the Earl of Tetness, who was a contemporary