nizance, a falcon with his wyngs displayed, standing on a wrethe of his coullers, supporting a speare armed hedded, or steeled sylver, fyxed uppon a helmet with mantell and tassels." In the same document (1599) the christian name of Mrs. Shakspeare is omitted, and her father erroneously designated of Wellingcote. The instrument of 1596, calls her "Mary, daughter and heyress of Robert Arden of Wilmecote." Some explanation is necessary of the apparent neglect of the authorities of these grants or confirmations of arms, in the account which has been given of the Shakspeare family. The assertion of these instruments is, that the ancestors of John Shakspeare were advanced and rewarded for their services to Henry the Seventh, by a grant of lands in those parts of Warwickshire, where they had continued for some descents, in good reputation and credit. The grant of 1596 reads "whose parent and late antecessors," which is corrected in another copy, by an interlineation, into "whose grandfather:" the confirmation of 1599 says, "whose parent and great-grandfather." I pass over the contradictions of the heralds as immaterial, and not at all affecting the question as to the persons meant by the "antecessors" of John Shakspeare. I do not think that the actual father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or any actual ancestor of John Shakspeare was at all in the contemplation of the heralds; 1st, because there is no trace whatever of a grant to any of the lineal ancestors of John Shakspeare, in the chapel of the rolls, during the whole reign of Henry the Seventh; 2dly, because there is no trace of any person of the name of Shakspeare ever having been in possession of lands or tenements, said to have been granted by royal bounty; but, on the contrary, the whole family, wherever they appear, present an uniform appearance of respectability without wealth; 3dly, because that which is quite irreconcileable, when interpreted of the lineal ancestor of John Shakspeare, is almost literally true of the ancestors of his wife, whose grandfather, Robert Arden, was groom of the bed-chamber to Henry VII., keeper of the royal park called Aldercar, bailiff of the lordship of Codnore, and keeper of the park there. In 1507, he obtained a lease from the crown of the manor of Yoxsall, in Stafford, of above 4600 acres for twenty-one years, at the low annual rent of forty-two pounds. I have no hesitation, therefore, to believe, that the Arden's, and not the Shakspeare's, were in the contemplation of the heralds when they spoke of the "antecessors" of the poet's father. Nor is any difficulty involved in this belief, it being usual in, and long after, the sixteenth century, for a husband to speak of the relatives of his wife in the same terms as he did of his own. Edward Alleyn, the player, constantly styles Philip Henslow his father, though he was only his wife's step-father. Thomas Nash, who married the poet's grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, calls Mrs. Hall in his will, his mother. Malone has produced a variety of instances of the lax application of the terms of relationship. (Shakspeare, vol. ii. p. 29. 31-2. note.) The inaccuracy and confusion of the heralds in these instruments, is a proof that they were not masters of the subject before them, which renders it little surprising that the grant of lands which they say was in Warwick, should turn out to have been in Stafford. To those who believe them incapable of the commission of such an error, the foregoing reasoning will be inconclusive, and consequently, in their estimation, fatal to the account given of John Shakspeare in the text. NOTE D. CONSIDERABLE obscurity has, from the days of Rowe, hung over the accounts of John Shakspeare's family, originating in the unhesitating application to the father of the poet of every circumstance recorded in the parishregister of John Shakspeare. After having eight children ascribed to him between 1558 and 1580, John Shakspeare is said, in 1584, to have married Margery Roberts, who died 1587. The register, however, goes on to record the birth of three children of John Shakspeare between March 1588-9, and September 1591. Whence it was inferred, that the poet's mother, Mary, though the register is silent, died shortly after 1580: that his father re-married in 1584, and that, on the death of his second wife, was still so enamoured of the matrimonial yoke as a third time to subject himself to its endurance, and became the father of the three children born from 1588 to 1591, he himself dying in 1601, and his third wife surviving him till 1608, when the death of Mary Shakspeare, widow, occurs. As there were no positive contradictions in this account, it was generally acquiesced in, though not as perfectly satisfactory. Malone has cleared the way for a much more natural statement, by observing, that throughout the register the father of the poet is invariably called John Shakspeare, without any distinction whatever, previous to his filling the office of high bailiff; but subsequently, wherever the baptisms or deaths of his children are recorded, he is denominated Mr. John Shakspeare (filius aut filia Magistri Shakspeare), a distinction ever afterwards conferred upon him, as upon every other bailiff, in all the records of the proceedings of the corporation. Now the person who married Margery Roberts fifteen years after the poet's father had been chief magistrate of Stratford, is simply called John Shakspeare, and the three children, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip, born between 1588 and 1591, are described as the children of John Shakspeare, without any distinction or addition to the name whatever. It admits not, therefore, of the slightest doubt, that the husband of Margery Roberts, and the father of the three children, was not the quondam bailiff of the borough. In answer to the question, who then was he? it is replied, in all probability, John Shakspeare, a shoe-maker, who, not being a native of the town, paid, in 1585-6, thirty shillings for his freedom in the Shoe-makers' Company; served as constable in 1586 and 1587; who had money advanced him by the corporation in 1590; was accepted in two cases as a security for the re-payment of money advanced by them to other individuals, and who was master of the Shoemakers' Company 1592. (Regis. Burg. Strat.) NOTE E. THE ingenuity of commentators will be tasked anew by the discovery that Shakspeare's father was a glover. The scenes of the dramatist must be ransacked for allusions to that indispensable feature in a gentleman's apparel, a pair of gloves. Passages must now be tortured to furnish evidence of the poet's intimate knowledge of the details of the business of a glove-maker. How much his own works countenance the tradition that he was a wool-dealer, may be seen in the notes on "Let me see: Every 'leven wether - tods; every tod yields-pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, What comes the wool to?" (Winter's Tale, Act IV. sc. 2.) The reader may consult also, though he would hardly have guessed it, the notes on "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” Hamlet, Act V. sc. 2. Shakspeare is reported to have been a butcher" Pat, like the catastrophe of the old comedy." "And as the butcher takes away the calf And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays, Henry VI. part 2. Act III. sc. 1. In these cases, however, there is a matter of reliance the voice of tradition. But it is straining for conse |