Thence where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hathaway, she being well toward the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a family at this time, we cannot now say; nor could his father-in-law tell then; on which score there was as certain traditions run some vain demurral. He may have been associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover; doubtless was; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling; doubtless was at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories too of lesser authenticity that he was over-familiar with the game in the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner. We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and its delightful park, and picturesque mossy walls-dappled with patches of shadow and with ivy leaveslook charmingly innocent of any harm their master could have done to William Shakespeare; but cer tain it is that the neighborhood grew too warm for him; and that he set off one day (being then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune. Family Relations. His wife and three children * stayed behind. In fact and it may as well be said here they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare's departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made *Susanna, the eldest, baptized 1583; Hamnet and Judith (twins), baptized 1585. In 1596 Hamnet died; in 1607 Susanna married Dr. Hall; and in 1616 (year of Shakespeare's death) Judith married Quiney, vintner. brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet's death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old townspeople grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little-perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of "Romeo and Juliet." "Oh, my love, Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks, His two daughters lived to maturity-both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was so far as known watchful and tender of his children's interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable. It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare's marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother-both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,* and with whom - specially the mother- most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement. His father died in 1601, and his mother in 1608. But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause or both may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy's death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people. His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of "Banbury-Cross" buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of |