of his children and her heirs, and forget totally to mention in his will that grander, that immortal estate of the mind which his genius had created, inconceivably more valuable than his "spacious possessions of dirt"?

VIII. HIS TREATMENT OF HIS FATHER'S MEMORY.

Let us pass to one other incident in the career of the Shakspere of Stratford.

We have seen that he strove to have his father made a gentleman. It will therefore scarcely be believed that, with an income equal to $25,000 per year of our money, he left that same father, and his mother, and his son Hamnet-his only son-without even the humblest monument to mark their last resting-place.

Richard Grant White says:

Shakespeare seems to have set up no stone to tell us where his mother or father lay, and the same is true as to his son Hamnet.'

It appears that he inherited some property from his father, certainly enough to pay for a headstone to mark the everlasting resting-place of the father of the richest man in Stratford - the father of the man who was "in judgment a Nestor, in genius a Socrates, in art a Maro!”

And they would have us believe that he was the same man who wrote:

I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweetened not thy breath: the robin would
With charitable bill (O bill, sore-shaming
Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie
Without a monument ! ) bring thee all this.

IX. HIS DAUGHTER JUDITH.

But let us go a step farther, and ask ourselves, what kind of a family was it that inhabited New Place during the latter years of Shakspere's life?

We have seen that the poet's father, mother and relatives generally were grossly ignorant; that they could not even write their own names, or read the Lord's Prayer in their native • Cymbeline, iv, 2.

Life and Genius of Shak., P. 144.

tongue; and that they did not possess even a Bible in their households.

But we now come face to face with a most astounding fact.

Shakspere had but two children who lived to maturity, his daughters Susanna and Judith, and Judith could not read or write ! Here is a copy of the mark with which the daugh

ter of Shakspere signed her name. It appears as that of an attesting witness to a conveyance in 1611, she being then twenty-seven years of

age.

Think of it! The daughter of William Shakspere, the daughter of the greatest intellect of his age, or of all ages, the profound scholar, the master of Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Danish, the philosopher, the scientist, the politician, the statesman, the physician, the musician, signs her name with a curley-queue like a Pottawatomie Indian. And this girl was twenty-seven years old, and no idiot; she was subsequently married to one of the leading citizens of the town, Thomas Quiney, vintner. She was raised in the same town wherein was the same free-school in which, we are assured, Shakspere received that magnificent education which is manifested in the Plays.

Imagine William E. Gladstone, or Herbert Spencer, dwelling in the same house with a daughter, in the full possession of all her faculties, who signed her name with a pot-hook. Imagine the father and daughter meeting every day and looking at each other! And yet neither of these really great men is to be mentioned in the same breath with the immortal genius who produced the Plays. With what divine anathemas did the real Shakespeare scourge ignorance!

The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue! Heaven bless thee from a tutor and discipline come not near thee."

Virtue and cunning [knowledge] were endowments greater

Than nobleness and riches; careless heirs

May the two latter darken and expend;
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god.'

And he found

More content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honor,
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death."

Can it be conceived that the man who wrote these things would try, by false representations, to secure a coat-of-arms for his family, and seek by every means in his power to grasp the shillings and pence of his poorer neighbors, and at the same time leave one of his children in "barbarous, barren, gross and miserable ignorance"?

With an income, as we have shown, equal to $25,000 yearly of our money; with the country swarming with graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, begging for bread and ready to act as tutors; living in a quiet, rural neighborhood, where there were few things to distract attention, William Shakspere permitted his daughter to attain the ripe age of twenty-seven years, unable to read the immortal quartos which had made her father famous and wealthy. We will not we cannot believe it.

-

X. SOME OF THE EDUCATED WOMEN OF THAT AGE.

But it may be said that it was the fault of the age.

It must be remembered, however, that the writer of the Plays was an exceptional man. He possessed a mind of vast and endless activity, which ranged into every department of human thought; he eagerly absorbed all learning.

Such another natural scholar we find in Sir Anthony Cook, tutor to King Edward IV., grandfather of Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil.

1 Richard II., i, 3.

1ad Henry IV., iv, 2.

Love's Labor Lost, iv, 2.
• Troilus and Cressida, ii, 3.

• Pericles, iii, a.
• Ibid.

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE.

FRANCIS BACON'S MASK.

Fac-simile of the Frontispiece in the Folio of 1623.

Facing this portrait in the Folio are presented Ben Jonson's famous lines:

This Figure, that thou here seest put
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With nature, to out-doo the life:

O, could he but have drawn his wit

As well in brasse, as he hath hit

His face, the Print would then surpasse
All that was ever writ in brasse.

But since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.