own purposes by too large an aim. Poets, whatever be the character of their poetry, are the objects of Gosson's newborn hostility. The three abuses of the time are held to be inseparable :-"As poetry and piping are cousin-germans, so piping and playing are of great affinity, and all three chained in links of abuse.” If the young Shakspere had his ambition turned towards dramatic poetry when he was sixteen, that ambition was not likely to be damped by Gosson's general declamation.

The earliest, and the most permanent, of poetical associations are those which are impressed upon the mind by localities which have a deep historical interest. It would be difficult to find a district possessing more striking remains of a past time than the neighbourhood in which William Shakspere spent his youth. The poetical feeling which the battle-fields, and castles, and monastic ruins of mid-England would excite in him, may be reasonably considered to have derived an intensity through the real history of these celebrated spots being vague, and for the most part traditional. The age of local historians had not yet arrived. The monuments of the past were indeed themselves much more fresh and perfect than in the subsequent days, when every tomb inscription was copied, and every mouldering document set forth. But in the year of 1580, if William Shakspere desired to know, for example, with some precision, the history which belonged to those noble towers of Warwick upon which he had often gazed with a delight that scarcely required to be based upon knowledge, he would look in vain for any guide to his inquiries. Some old people might tell him that they remembered their fathers to have spoken of one John Rous, the son of Geffrey Rous of Warwick, who, having diligently studied at Oxford, and obtained a reputation for uncommon learning, rejected all ambitious thoughts, shut himself up with his books in the solitude of Guy's Cliff, and was engaged to the last in writing the Chronicles of his country, and especially the history of his native County and its famous Earls and there, in the quiet of that pleasant place, performing his daily offices of devotion as a chantry priest in the little chapel, did John Rous live a life of happy industry

till 1491. But the world in general derived little profit from his labours. Yet if the future Poet sustained some disadvantage by living before the days of antiquarian minuteness, he could still dwell in the past, and people it with the beings of his own imagination. The Chroniclers would, however, afford him ample materials to work into his own topography. There was a truth which was to be found amidst all the mistakes and contradictions of the annalists-the great poetical truth, that the devices of men are insufficient to establish any permanent command over events; that crime would be followed by retribution; that evil passions would become their own tormentors; that injustice could not be successful to the end; that although dimly seen and unwillingly acknowledged, the great presiding power of the world could make evil work for good, and advance the general happiness out of the particular misery. This was the mode, we believe, in which that thoughtful youth read the Chronicles of his country, whether brief or elaborate. Looking at them by the strong light of local association, there would be local tradition at hand to enforce that universal belief in the justice of God's providence which is in itself alone one of the many proofs of that justice.

Hall, the chronicler, writing his history of 'The Families of Lancaster and York,' about seventy years after the “ tinual dissension for the crown of this noble realm" was ter

con

minated, says,- "What nobleman liveth at this day, or what gentleman of any ancient stock or progeny is clear, whose lineage hath not been infested and plagued with this unnatural division?" During the boyhood of William Shakspere, it cannot be doubted that he would meet with many a gentleman, and many a yeoman, who would tell him how their forefathers had been thus "infested and plagued." The traditions of the most stirring events of that contest would at this time be about a century old; generally diluted in their interest by passing through the lips of three or four generations, but occasionally presented vividly to the mind of the inquiring boy in the narration of some amongst the "hoary-headed eld," whose fathers had fought at Bosworth or Tewksbury. Many of these traditions, too, would be es

sentially local; extending back even to the period when the banished Duke of Hereford in his bold march

"From Ravenspurg to Cotswold," a

gathered a host of followers in the counties of Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Warwick, and Worcester. Fields, where battles had been fought; towns, where parliaments had assembled, and treaties had been ratified; castles, where the great leaders had stood at bay, or had sallied forth upon the terrified country-such were the objects which the young poet would associate with many an elaborate description of the chroniclers, and many an interesting anecdote of his ancient neighbours. It appears to us that his dramatic power was early directed towards this long and complicated story, by some principle even more exciting than its capabilities for the purposes of the drama. It was the story, we think, which was presented to him in the evening-talk around the hearth of his childhood; it was the story whose written details were most accessible to him, being narrated by Hall with a rare minuteness of picturesque circumstance, but it was a story also of which his own district had been the scene, in many of its most stirring events. Out of ten English Historical Plays which were written by him, and some undoubtedly amongst his first performances, he has devoted eight to circumstances belonging to this memorable story. No other nation ever possessed such a history of the events of a century,-a history in which the agents are not the hard abstractions of warriors and statesmen, but men of flesh and blood like ourselves; men of passion, and crime, and virtue; elevated perhaps by the poetical art, but filled, also through that art, with such a wondrous life, that we dwell amongst them as if they were of our own day, and feel that they must have spoken as he has made them speak, and act as he has made them act. It is in vain that we are told that some events are omitted, and some transposed; that documentary history does not exhibit its evidence here, that a contemporary narrative somewhat militates against the representation there. The general truth of this dramatic history cannot be shaken. It is a philosophical history in the very

■ 'Richard II.,' Act II., Scene 3.

highest sense of that somewhat abused term. It contains the philosophy that can only be produced by the union of the noblest imagination with the most just and temperate judgment. It is the loftiness of the poetical spirit which has enabled Shakspere alone to write this history with impartiality. Open the chroniclers, and we find the prejudices of the Yorkist or the Lancastrian manifesting the intensity of the old factious hatred. Who can say to which faction Shakspere belongs? He has comprehended the whole, whilst others knew only a part.

The last play of the series which belongs to the Wars of the Roses is unquestionably written altogether with a more matured power than those which preceded it; yet the links which connect it with the other three plays of the series are so unbroken, the treatment of character is so consistent, and the poetical conception of the whole so uniform, that, whatever amount of criticism may be yet in store to show that our view is incorrect, we now confidently speak of them all as the plays of Shakspere, and of Shakspere alone. Matured, especially in its wonderful exhibition of character, as the 'Richard III.' is, we cannot doubt that the subject was very early familiar to the young poet's mind. The Battle of Bosworth Field was the great event of his own locality, which for a century had fixed the government of England. The course of the Reformation, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries, had produced great social changes, which were in operation at the time in which William Shakspere was born; whose effects, for good and for evil, he must have seen working around him, as he grew from year to year in knowledge and experience. But those events were too recent, and indeed of too delicate a nature, to assume the poetical aspect in his mind. They abided still in the region of prejudice and controversy. It was dangerous to speak of the great religious divisions of a kingdom with a tolerant impartiality. History could scarcely deal with these opinions in a spirit of justice. Poetry, thus, which has regard to what is permanent and universal, has passed by these matters, important as they are. But the great event which placed the Tudor family on the throne, and gave England a stable government, however occasionally distracted by civil and

religious division, was an event which would seize fast upon such a mind as that of William Shakspere. His ancestor, there can be little doubt, had been an adherent of the Earl of Richmond. For his faithful services to the conqueror at Bosworth he was rewarded, as we are assured, by lands in Warwickshire. That field of Bosworth would therefore have to him a family as well as a local interest. Burton, the historian of Leicestershire, who was born about ten years after William Shakspere, tells us "that his great-great-grandfather, John Hardwick, of Lindley, near Bosworth, a man of very short stature, but active and courageous, tendered his service to Henry, with some troops of horse, the night he lay at Atherston, became his guide to the field, advised him in the attack, and how to profit by the sun and by the wind." Burton further says, writing in 1622, that the inhabitants living around the plain called Bosworth Field, more properly the plain of Sutton, "have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory, by reason that some persons thereabout, which saw the battle fought, were living within less than forty years, of which persons myself have seen some, and have heard of their disclosures, though related by the second hand." This, "living within less than forty years" would take us back to about the period which we are now viewing in relation to the life of Shakspere. But certainly there is something over-marvellous in Burton's story, to enable us to think that William Shakspere, even as a very young boy, could have conversed with " some persons thereabout" who had seen a battle fought in 1485. That, as Burton more reasonably of himself says, he might have "heard their discourses at second-hand" is probable enough. Bosworth Field is about thirty miles from Stratford. Burton says that the plain derives its name from Bosworth, "not that this battle was fought at this place (it being fought in a large, flat plain, and spacious ground, three miles distant from this town, between the towns of Shenton, Sutton, Dadlington, and Stoke); but for that this town was the most worthy town of note near adjacent, and was therefore called Bosworth Field. That this battle was fought in this plain appeareth by many remarkable places: By a little mount cast up, where the common report is, that at the first beginning of the