We may now return upon a topic designedly pretermitted, and spend a paragraph or two on the tnditions that relate to Shakespeare's departure from Stratford. There is no evidence to prove that he may not have come to London in the latter half of 1584, at the age of twenty, instead of eighteen, as reported by tradition. In 1587, the plavers of the Earl of Leicester, the company of James Burbage, to which he is found attached, was one of five to whom payments were made for performances by the Stratford corporation. They had frequently visited the town before, and this may easily have been the opportunity that decided the poet to attach himself to the profession, and seek for fortune and advancement where he could at the same time indulge and exercise the impulse of his genius The connection of the Earl of Leicester with Kenilworth, and the frequency of names and combinations of names agreeing with those of his players, in Warwickshire and even at Stratford and the neighbourhood, render it not unlikely that the company was closely connected with this county, which had a renown for shows and mysteries, from the celebrated displays and festivities of Coventry. Richard Burbage, the son of James, and the future friend and fellow of Shakespeare, must have been very nearly of his age; he became the chief of the original actors in his friend's plays, and the reputation that he gained proves that he must have been a genius of the very highest histrionic stamp. Nature, in giving to the world the genius of Shakespeare precisely at the time that the stage had become settled and organized, precisely at the interval between the equally inimical predominances of Catholicism and of Puritanism, and when political quarrels had not yet gained such head as to cause the destruction of courts, that were indispensable for the protection and encouragement of refined, intellectual, and costly arts,-Nature did not grudge, besides, conducting to the very conjuncture of all these favouring circumstances, in exactest coincidence of time and place, the very man to give a living voice and motion to the dumb and still imaginations of his

creative mind. The effect is the same whether Richard Burbage and Shakespeare encountered first at Stratford or at London; if it were at Stratford it is manifest that we are on the trace of an influence competent to have decided his course-whatever others failing this may have supplied its place. Among these would have been the crisis in his father's affairs; tradition says that another was an embroilment with Sir Thomas Lucy, through a deerstealing frolic, reprehensible enough, no doubt, for the father of a family, young as he might be, but still not impossible. The whole story may possibly be false; but it must still be noted that the tale has details that fit in remarkably with facts about this very date.

Rowe's account is to the effect that for a certain time after his marriage he continued at Stratford in a settled occupation, which he may have known from tradition or gathered by inference from the registry of his children.

....

"In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of forced him out of his country and that way of living he had taken up. He had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deerstealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London."

The tradition was current in the neighbourhood of Stratford about 1700, and the ballad was said to have been stuck upon the knight's park gate; and what purported to be the first verse of it came down through this channel to Oldys and Capell.

"A parliamente member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrowe, at London an asse,
If lowsie is Lucy, as some folk miscall it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it:
He thinks himself great,

Yet an asse in his state,

We allow by his eares but with asses to mate

If Lucy is lowsie, as some folk miscall it,

Sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it."

It is certain that Shakespeare had some pique against Sir Thomas Lucy, and indulged it by satirizing him as Justice Shallow, whose heraldic cognizance of a dozen white luces, or, as Sir Hugh Evans calls them, louses, is a perversion of the old coat of the knight,-three luces, that is, full grown pikes, haurient. This is in The Merry Wives of Windsor; but in the earlier Second Part of Henry IV. we find the allusion more covertly, when Falstaff says of his scarecrow host, "if the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him." Again as Sir Thomas married into a Gloucestershire family, it is probable enough that some of his cousins supplied hints for his brethren of the peace, Silence and Slender, who, like Shallow, are of that county. Something was to be gained by the locality, or Falstaff would not have been carried from London to York by a route through Gloucestershire, nor Cotswold have been brought within an easy distance of Master Ford at Windsor. The allusion to the deerstealing frolic of Falstaff, I confess, seems somewhat strained and gratuitous, if it does not cover a reminiscence,—and there is altogether something very suspicious in the evident zest with which Shakespeare seizes a chance of ridiculing a constable or a magistrate, from Dogberry to a Roman tribune. I recognize in this something of the vindictive feeling of one who has been in custody, well merited or not, and cannot restrain spleen thereafter against even the most harmless or most useful functionary of watch and ward. Then, again, the terms of the balladthough it may have spurious origin, and the anecdote still be true-are oddly enough in agreement with a fact of the assumed date that would not be known to a later forger, for Sir Thomas Lucy was a parliament member in the very years in question, and his limited legislative activities were divided between fur

thering the relaxations of discipline favoured by puritanical preachers, and strengthening the securities for preservation of grain and game. Charlecote was not at the time a park in the statutable sense, but as Sir Thomas Lucy had venison to give away at a later date, it is not unlikely that the fact that his enclosures had not the special preservation of the statute, helped the temptation of depredators. Stealing deer and stealing rabbits are classed together, with other youthful irregularities of the time, as not very heinous outbreaks; and as Rowe connects the flight of the poet not with the prosecution for the trespass, but with anger at the libel, I have sometimes thought that the first may have occurred when he was a mere stripling, and have had a stripling's punishment; and that the irritating retaliation may have been nothing less than the suggestion to player associates to exhibit the starch justice upon a stage in his own town, and that this may have been the form of first publication of the offensive verses.

It is impossible to sift truth from evidence essentially inconclusive; when the most probable inference is determined, we have still to remember that the true is often the least probable, on general considerations. The enquiry can only end with a statement of an impression,—— my own is much to the effect that I have shadowed forth above, though I am conscious of another very plausible hypothesis. It is, that the pique of Shakespeare was of much later origin, and connected with opposition made to his acquisition from the heralds of authorized arms and title of gentry, prolific gossip having all the responsibility of turning the details of his satire into a biogra phical anecdote.

Among the sonnets occur one or two that partly ascribe the adoption of a player's life to necessities of fortune, but partly, at least by implication, to that wellknown influence in youth, called being stage-struck: so at least I understand the following:

"O for my sake do you with Fortune chide
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means, which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works with, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst like a willing patient I will drink
Potions of eysell 'gainst my strong infection:
No bitterness that I will bitter think,

Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.'

Shakespeare, who was a lover, and a successful one at eighteen, had written verses we may be sure before he was twenty-three, probably had completed his two poems of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, published long after; if therefore he really became an actor in 1587, which seems most probable, but is not therefore necessarily to be admitted, he was prepared at once to make his powers available dramatically. The traditions of the town, both through Rowe and the old clerk, agree that his first position in the company was very subordinate, but that his progress was rapid. Genius of the highest order often emerges from obscurity by a single performance, and it is well to correct our judgment of what Shakespeare may have done by the age of twentyfive, when Nash's sarcasm was promulgated, by recollecting the early and rapid manifestation and development of the kindred genius of Raphael or Mozart.

It is cheerless work to have to deal at the turning point of a biography, with mere probabilities and possibilities, but after this review of them, we may be better able to form an opinion on one in especial that is too interesting for any purist in evidence to hustle aside. It appears to have been in 1590 at the earliest, that Edmund Spenser in his "Tears of the Muses," alluded to a dramatic poet in terms that are admirably characteristic both of the disposition and art of Shakespeare, that certainly were unjustifiable if intended for any other, and that have a spirit and force of appreciation that belong alone to masterstrokes struck after no mere imagination but from