not a word about the dignities of Justice Shallow, his old coat, or his quarters. Those passages first appeared in the folio of 1623. They probably existed when the play was acted before James in November, 1604:— "Shallow. Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire. Slender. In the county of Gloster, justice of peace, and coram. Shal. Ay, cousin Slender, and cust-alorum. Slen. Ay, and ratolorum too; and a gentleman born, master parson; who writes himself armigero; in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, armigero. Shal. Ay, that I do; and have done any time these three hundred years. Slen. All his successors, gone before him, have done 't; and all his ancestors, that come after him, may they may give the dozen white luces in their coat. Shal. It is an old coat. Evans. The dozen white louses do become an old coat well; it agrees well, passant: it is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love. Shal. The luce is the fresh fish; the salt fish is an old coat." The allusion of the dozen white luces cannot be mistaken. "Three luces hauriant, argent," are the arms of the Lucys. The luce is a pike-"the fresh fish,”—but the pike of the Lucys, as shown in their arms in the church window of Charlcote,* are hauriant, springing, the heraldic term applied to fish; saltant being the term applied to quadrupeds in the same attitude. This is the salt or saltant fish of Shallow. The whole passage is a playful satire upon the solemn pretensions of one with three hundred years of ancestry boasting of his "old coat." The "dozen white louses" (the vulgarism covered by the Welshman's pronunciation) points the application of the satire with a personality which, coming from one whose habitual practice was never to ridicule classes or individuals, shows that it was a smart return for some insult or injury. The old coat, we believe, could not endure the neighbourhood of the new coat. The dozen white luces" could not leap in the same atmosphere in which the "spear in bend" presumed to dwell. We can understand the ridicule of the old coat in the second copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor, without connecting it with the absurd story of the prosecution for deer-stealing by the elder Sir Thomas Lucy. The ballad attributed to Shakspere is clearly a modern forgery, founded upon the passage in The Merry Wives of Windsor.+ If the ridicule of the "old coat" had been intended to mark Shakspere's sense of early injuries, it would have appeared in the first copy of that play, when the feeling which prompted the satire was strong, because the offence was recent. It finds a place in the enlarged copy of that comedy, produced, there can be little doubt, at a period when some one had prompted an attack upon the validity of the armorial honours which were granted to his father; attacking himself, in all likelihood, in the insolent spirit of an aristocratic provinciality. The revenge is enduring; the subject of the revenge is forgotten. The antiquarian microscope has discovered that, in 1602, Sir Thomas Lucy (not the same who punished Shakspere "for stealing his deer," because he died in 1600) sent Sir Thomas * See Dugdale's 'Warwickshire,' p. 401. + See p. 230. See Egerton Papers, published by the Camden Society, p. 350, in which this fact is overlooked. Egerton the present of a buck, on the very occasion when the Othello of Shakspere was presented before Queen Elizabeth at Harefield. Whatever might be the comparative honours of William Shakspere and the Knight of Charlcote at the beginning of the seventeenth century, this fact furnishes a precise estimate of their relative importance for all future times. Posterity has settled the debate between the new coat and the old coat by a very summary arbitrement. With the exception of this piece of ridicule in The Merry Wives of Windsor, we know not of a single personality which can be alleged against Shakspere, in an age when his dramatic contemporaries, especially, bespattered their rivals and their enemies as fiercely as any modern paragraph writer. But vulgar opinion, which is too apt most easily to recognise the power of talent in its ability to inflict pain—which would scarcely appreciate the sentiment, 66 To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant " has assigned to Shakspere a performance which has the quality, extraordinary as regards himself, of possessing scurrility without wit. It is something lower in the moral scale even than the fabricated ballad upon Sir Thomas Lucy; for it exhibits a wanton and unprovoked outrage upon an unoffending neighbour, in the hour of convivial intercourse. Rowe tells the story as if he thought he were doing honour to the genius of the man whose good qualities he is at the same moment recording: "The latter part of his life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be-in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. He had the good fortune to gather an estate equal to his occasion, and, in that, to his wish; and is said to have spent some years before his death at his native Stratford. His pleasurable wit and good nature engaged him in the acquaintance, and entitled him to the friendship, of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood. Amongst them, it is a story still remembered in that country that he had a particular intimacy with Mr. Combe, an old gentleman noted thereabouts for his wealth and usury: it happened, that in a pleasant conversation amongst their common friends, Mr. Combe told Shakspeare, in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph, if he happened to outlive him, and since he could not know what might be said of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately, upon which Shakspeare gave him these four lines:— Ten in the hundred lies here ingrav'd; "T is a hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd: If any man ask, Who lies in this tomb? Oh! Oh! quoth the devil, 't is my John-a-Combe.' But the sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so severely, that he never forgave it." Certainly this is an extraordinary illustration of Shakspere's pleasurable wit and good nature”—of those qualities which won for him the name of the "gentle Shakspere;" which made Jonson, stern enough to most men, proclaim-" He was honest, and of an open and free nature,” and that his "mind and manners" were reflected in his "well-turned and true 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 variation, 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 old 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 of his "curious knotted garden;" little dreaming that his very fame in future times should accelerate its fall.‡ * Aubrey. + See Howes's Continuation of Stow's Chronicle,' p. 894. See Note on New Place at the end of this Chapter. The register of marriages at Stratford-upon-Avon, for the year 1607, contains the following entry : Joper hall yirthima & Enforma Exapspor Susanna, the eldest daughter of William Shakspere, was now twenty-four years of age. John Hall, gentleman, a physician settled at Stratford, was in his thirtysecond year. This appears in every respect to have been a propitious alliance. Shakspere received into his family a man of learning and talent. Dr. Hall lived at a period when medicine was throwing off the empirical rules by which it had been too long directed; and a school of zealous practitioners were beginning to rise up who founded their success upon careful observation. It was the age which produced the great discoveries of Harvey. Shakspere's son-in-law belonged to this school of patient and accurate observers. He kept a record of the cases which came under his care; and his notes, commencing in the year 1617, still exist in manuscript. The minutes of his earlier practice are probably lost. The more remarkable of the cases were published more than twenty years after his death, being translated from the original Latin by James Cooke, and given to the world under the title of Select Observations on English Bodies, or Cures in desperate Diseases.' This work went through three editions. Folatl [Signature of Dr. Hall.] The season at which the marriage of Shakspere's elder daughter took place would appear to give some corroboration to the belief that, at this period, he had wholly ceased to be an actor. It is not likely that an event to him so deeply interesting would have taken place during his absence from Stratford. It was the season of performances at the Globe; when the eager multitude who crowded the pit might look up through the open roof upon a brilliant sky; and when the poet, whose productions were the chief attraction of that stage, might rejoice that he could wander in the free woods, and the fresh fields, from the spring time, "When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, to the last days of autumn, when he saw "The summer's green all girded up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard." |