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belonged to provincial society can only present themselves under the aspect of the ludicrous. William Shakspere was no doubt pointed out by some of his neighbours as the rich player that had "gone to London very meanly." It appears to us that we can trace the workings of this jealousy in a small matter which has hitherto been viewed somewhat differently. The father and mother of Shakspere were of good family,-a circumstance inore regarded in those days than wealth. We never have attempted to show that John Shakspere was a wealthy man; but we have contended that the evidence by which it has been sought to prove that he was "steeped up to the very lips in poverty" did not support the allegation.* On the grant of arms to John Shakspere made in 1596, which is preserved in the Herald's College, † there is a memorandum which appears to have been made as an explanation of the circumstances connected with the grant. It recites that John Shakspere showed a previous patent; that he had been chief officer of Stratford; "that he hath lands and tenements, of good wealth and substance, five hundred pounds; that he married a daughter and heir of Arden, a gentleman of worship." Malone, who published this document, holds that the assertion that he was worth five hundred pounds is incompatible with the averment of a bill in Chancery, filed by John Shakspere and Mary his wife, against John Lamberte, who had foreclosed upon the estate of Asbies, mortgaged to his father in 1578. The concluding petition of this bill in Chancery says:-"And for that also the said John Lamberte is of great wealth and ability, and well friended and allied amongst gentlemen and freeholders of the country in the said county of Warwick, where he dwelleth, and your said orators are of small wealth and very few friends and alliance in the said county." Malone calls this "the confession of our poet's father himself" of his poverty, and even of his insolvency. The averments of the petition and the replication afford a proof to the contrary; for these documents state that the mortgagee wrongfully held possession of the premises, although the mortgage-money was tendered in 1580. The complainant says that he is a man of small wealth, -the man against whom he complains is one of great wealth. The possessor of five hundred pounds was not, even in those days, a man of great wealth; but it was a reason, according to the heralds, for such a grant of arms as belonged to a gentleman. But he had "very few friends and alliance in the said county." This was a motive probably for some one of higher wealth and greater friends making an attempt to disturb the honours which the heralds had confirmed to John Shakspere. It appears that some charges were made against Garter and Clarencieux, Kings at Arms (which offices were then held by Dethick and Camden), that they had wrongfully given arms to certain persons, twenty-three in number. The answer of Garter and Clarencieux, preserved in the Herald's College, was presented on the 10th of May, 1602; and it appears that John Shakspere was one of those named in the "libellous scroll," as the heralds call it. Their answer as regards Shakspere is as follows: "Shakespere.-It may as well be said that Hareley, who beareth gould a hend between two cotizes sables, and all other that [bear] or and argent

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a bend sables, usurpe the coat of Lo. Manley. As for the speare in bend, [it] is a patible difference; and the person to whom it was granted hath borne magestracy, and was justice of peace at Stratford-upon-Avon. He married the daughter and heire of Arderne, and was able to maintain that estate," The information or "libellous scroll," was heard before Lord Howard and others on the 1st of May, 1602. At that time John Shakspère had been dead six months. The answer of the heralds points to the position of the person to whom the arms were granted in 1599, when the shield of Shakspere was impaled with the ancient arms of Arden of Wellingcote.* In May, 1602, William Shakspere bore these joint arms of his father and mother by virtue of the grant of 1599; and against him, therefore, was the "libellous scroll" directed. He had bought a "place of lordship" in the county of Warwick; he was written down in all indentures, gentleman and generosus; he had a new coat of arms, it is true, but he claimed it through a gentle ancestry. Was there any one in his immediate neighbourhood, a rich and proud man, who looked upon the acquisition of lands and houses by the poor player with a self-important jealousy? Sir Thomas Lucy-he who possessed Charlcote in the days of William Shakspere's youthwas dead. He died on the 6th of July, 1600; and it is probable that he who had looked with reverence upon the worthy knight when, as a boy, he was unfamiliar with greatness, might have dropped a tear upon his grave in the parish church of Charlcote. But another Sir Thomas Lucy, who had just succeeded to large possessions, might have thought it necessary to make an attempt to lower, in the eyes of his neighbours, the importance of the presumptuous man who, being nothing but an actor and a poet, had presumed to write himself gentleman. In the first copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor there is

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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."

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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

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↑ 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,

"O, it is excellent

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;

'Tis 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 I well-turned and true

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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."

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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 reccive 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.

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