probably for the theatre. In 1610 it is supposed that he made a final retirement to Stratford. In 1611 he appears as having again made additions to his property of twenty acres of pasture land (lesves as they are often called,) bought of John and William Combe, upon one of whom he did merrily fann up some witty and facetious verses," for which John Combe has left him 57. in his will. Mr. Halliwell's volume may be consulted for the traditionary anecdotes relating to them. In March 1612-13 Shakspere bought a house in "the Blackfriars of Henry Walker, abutting on a street leading down to Puddle Wharf on the east part, right against the King's Majesty's wardrobe." A house near St. Andrew's Church is still pointed out as the tenement, and Mr. Halliwell has given a view of it. (P. 247.) It is supposed to have some reference to his theatrical property in the vicinity. It cost 1407. but 60%. remained on mortgage. About this time he was engaged in another suit relating to the tithe he rented of the corporation. In the same year the Globe Theatre was destroyed by fire, but it is not known whether Shakspere was then proprietor. In 1614 he was occupied in business relating to proposed inclosures on the common lands at Stratford, opposed by the corporation. The Stratford records contain no further notice of him before his death in 1616; "but the following entry, which occurs in the Chamberlain's accounts for 1614, appears to shew that the religious devotion which characterized his descendants had already exhibited itself.

"Item, for on quart of sack and on quart of clarrett wine geven to a preacher. at the Newe Place, xx". ;' and the notice is of more importance than might be at first supposed, for it seems to give a decided negative to the incredible assertion of Davies (p. 123), that Shakspere died a

Papist. The poet may possibly have become piously inclined during his latter days, but I think most direct testimony is against such an opinion, and the epitaph on his daughter seems to imply the contrary:

Witty above her sexe,-but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistriss Hall.
Something of Shakspere was in that-but this
Wholy of Him with whom she's now in blisse."

The last notice of Shakspere in London is dated in November 1614, and no account of his engagements in the following year has been discovered. On Feb. 10, 1616, his daughter Judith was married to Thomas Quiney, whose father in 1598 had applied to Shakspere for a loan of money, 301. Their son Shakspere Quiney, baptized in the following November, was probably named after the deceased poet; and there can be no doubt, from the notice in Shakspere's will, that the nuptials were celebrated with his sanction. It has been supposed that the will had special reference to this marriage, having been originally dated "vicesimo quinto die Januarii, anno regni domini nostri Jacobi nunc regis Angliæ, &c. decimo quarto;" but the 25th of January in the fourteenth year of James fell in 1617, so that we may perhaps conclude this was only a clerical error. The poet is there described as in perfect health and memory, yet in a few short weeks he was no more.

Shakspere died at New Place on April 23rd, 1616, and was buried in the chancel of Stratford church two days afterwards. The poet may have been in good health for all we know in January, but the second signature to the will in March is surely, as Malone observes, the irregular, weak, and tremulous hand of illness: and therefore it would not appear that he was cut off by any sudden or violent disease, as of fever, as Mr. Ward

affirms. As for festive meetings and bad drainage, we repudiate them altogether; besides, the fevers occasioned by wine in circulation or by water in stagnation, are of two very different kinds. Which, then, was the cause of the fatal issue-the mull'd sack, or the putrid sewer? Which the result― the continued or the typhus fever? It is quite as likely that, in a life of constant exertion of mind and waste of body, he had burnt the candle to the socket, and retired to Stratford when Nature had given him timely warning to retreat.

Mr. Halliwell closes his biography by saying, "The character of Shakspere is even better substantiated than his history. We have direct and undeniable proofs that he was provident and active in the business of life, judicious and honest, possessing great conversational talent, universally esteemed as gentle and amiable, yet more desirous of accumulating property than increasing his reputation, and occasionally indulging in courses irregular and wild,' but not incompatible with this generic summary." And he had previously said (p. 194), “I venture to hazard a remark that may hereafter be discussed, that Shakspere's energies required in some measure the impulse of necessity to develope them in the full extent, and that, after his fortune was made, acting and writing became secondary objects."

Dr. Farmer, in his Essay on the Learning of Shakspere, has said,"Every writer on Shakspere hath expressed his astonishment that this author was not solicitous to secure his family a correct edition of his performances;" and he there states the reasons to be that he sold his works to the company, whose property they became, and it was their interest to keep them safe in manuscript from their rivals. Mr. Capell thinks that he really had formed such a design, but towards his latter days, and when it was too late to put it into execution. But Malone, agreeing with Farmer, says,-" "We have an indisputable proof of a fact which has been doubted, and can now pronounce with certainty that our poet was entirely careless of literary fame, and would patiently endure to be made answerable for compositions which were not his own, without using any means to undeceive the public." Whether Shakspere looked on his great productions with indifference, or whether he treated them with neglect, we have no means of knowing: Farmer's argument is good to a certain extent,—that after his plays were written they were no longer his own property, and were jealously secured by the purchasers; yet such was the respect and admiration of him, and such the natural regard for their own interest, that they would gladly have received from his hands any alterations and improvements he had chosen to make: so that we may reasonably conclude that when Shakspere left the theatre he dismissed any further thoughts about those works on which he had spent the best and longest portion of his life, and by which he had established at once his fortune and his fame. Yet we must confess that in our apprehension there is some singularity in the matter not removed by the common explanation and apologies. It is barely possible that after his retirement, according to Capell's opinion, he had not time nor leisure to revise and amend them; it is also possible that he had no longer the desire; for, granting that he had not the liberty of collecting and printing them, he could have kept in his own possession, or bestowed on his old friends the players, corrected copies of all his productions Could it be, we ask with all possible diffidence, and willingness to be corrected if we are thought wrong, or considered to be uttering one unkind or unjust thought regarding him whose genius is as much our pride and delight

as it is that of the world's; we then ask whether-under the increasing seriousness which naturally arises in the mind as the shadows of declining life approach, and when the mimic representations and transitory splendours of the theatre had gradually faded away before the realities of a new sphere of action-before the solid occupations, the tranquil thoughts, and social obligations of his new existence he may not have reflected with few feelings of approbation or content on subjects that had formed the whole prolonged and perpetual occupation of his thoughts, and yet could afford little consolation to the anxieties and little satisfaction to the thoughtfulness of advancing age? When he looked back on the gigantic efforts of his mighty genius, he may perhaps have felt that, in the exercise of his great and noble art, he had no higher principle in view than to awaken, if so he could, the strongest sympathies, to appeal to the most seductive passions, and to pour a voice of power into the remotest recesses of the agitated mind; and that, after the toil by which his conquest was acquired, nothing remained which he could contemplate with delight, save only the grandeur of its aim and the success. of its achievement. The richest gifts of nature and the highest manifestations of genius were lavished on too elaborate displays of elegance and too fascinating forms of poetic description; in painting the wild desires, the guilty passions, the idle sensations, and fantastic humour, the folly and the vice of the human heart, for the mere amusement of the low, the frivolous, the sensual, and the profane. Amid the altered engagements and the substantial occupations of real life, he may have recollected his former course as a kind of empty and painted mockery of existence; when, amidst the influence of interested motives, all his great powers of intellect were employed in forming imaginary creations and contemplating transitory delights; sometimes in throwing a false and delusive splendour over the varied path of life, and sometimes covering with dark and tempestuous shadows the moral landscape of mankind. Had he looked back to the great tragic drama of an elder country, he could have seen on what a deeper foundation of reason, piety, and truth, its purposes were laid, its subjects formed, and its energies confined-where amidst the gloomiest prospects, the darkest calamities, and even the undeserved miseries of life, the innocent and the suffering acknowledged the inevitable powers of destiny and the inexorable justice of heaven-where every thought was filled and every mind inspired with a reverential awe of the supreme power of divine government; acknowledging human weakness in the inferior nature of its creation to Him in whose awful sight no guilt was pardoned, no error palliated, no virtue was strong enough to redeem, no patience meek enough to restore. Such was the serious aim and purpose of that wonderful and unequalled drama, which the great philosopher of the ancient world pronounced to be the highest achievement of human genius, the best corrector of human passions, and the truest teacher and purifier of the human heart. If this is not so on the modern stage; if it has too often been contented with the lower aim of transient gratification, forgetting its great purposes, and loftier designs, Then when this blot shall be observed

SIR KENELME DIGBY, HIS CHARACTER AND WRITINGS.

THE name of Sir Kenelme Digby calls up various and generally very indistinct associations in the minds of modern readers. According to the kinds of reading or study to which they have been accustomed, he is regarded as the philosopher, the quack, the soldier, the man of learning, the friend of Descartes, the courtier, the critic, or the chivalrous gallant, or as a combination of some or all of these. Just views of this remarkable character are rare. Digby's literary reputation rests chiefly upon his short notes to Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici," by no means the most markworthy of his productions. The reader of novels and "Memoirs" knows him only from Sir H. Nicolas's publication, from the MS. in the British Museum, of the partly fabulous history of his connection with Venetia Stanley, written by himself. The student of history and literature in general has derived his knowledge of him from accounts of his life, the writers of which have been unacquainted with that very curious document. We shall place before our readers as complete an account of Sir Kenelme's character as our space and the existing materials will admit of.

His father, Sir Everard Digby, was, perhaps, the most respectable of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Treason, and at the time he atoned for his crime upon the scaffold his eldest son Kenelme was three years of age, having been born on the 11th of June, 1603. Sir Kenelme complains, in his Memoirs, in which he appears under the name of Theagenes, that he "from his father hath inherited nothing but a foul stain in his blood for attempting to make a fatal revolution in the state." But," writes the editor of Sir Kenelme's MS., "such was not strictly true, for two of Sir Everard's manors, as well as his wife's property, having been entailed, the crown was defeated in the effort to take possession of them, and Digby is considered to have inherited an estate of 3,000l. per annum." His mother, Mary, the daughter and co-heiress of William Mulsho of Gotthurst, in Buckinghamshire, was a Catholic in profession, but GENT. MAG. VOL. XXIX.

she is commonly supposed to have permitted her son Kenelme, from political motives, to be educated in the Protestant faith. He was placed, at an early age, under the tuition of Archbishop Laud, at that time Dean of Gloucester. Since, however, there are arguments in favour of the supposition that Digby was a Catholic as early as 1623, Sir II. Nicolas suggests that he might never, in reality, have been of any other religion. But we do not think that either supposition is borne out by facts. Digby was not the man to have dissimulated his religion so well and so long as he must have done, in order to give rise to the correspondence which passed between him and Laud in 1636, upon the occasion of his professed conversion to Catholicism. Digby's mind, which was

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'As wide as Asia, and as weak," was of precisely the nature to acknowledge the plausible pretensions of the Roman Church, and to deliver up his intellect to her service with delight. He was a man of much thought, little judgment, and considerable inherent goodness; and such men lean naturally more than others to an external authority. Digby had, moreover, a very acute feeling for superficial beauty of all kinds; and his share of credulity was large, as is sufficiently proved by the course taken by him with regard to the celebrated "sympathetic powder." It would be difficult to conceive a character more likely to take up hastily with the seductive faith of Rome than was that of Sir Kenelme Digby.

When Digby was fifteen years old he went to Oxford, and was entered at Gloucester Hall, where he studied under the distinguished scholar Thomas Allen. During the two years of his residence at the University Digby obtained a brilliant reputation. In the year 1621 he set out upon his travels; and from this time to the year 1623 we know nothing concerning him besides what is to be found in his own "Memoirs."

The general fidelity of these memoirs is not to be doubted, their narrative being in very many cases supported by 3 Q