Arden, the innocent and brave, should ever come to light. Arden's guilt was the same as that of Naboth; and his words, 'I wish the queen were in heaven,' were so rigidly and severely handled by a mighty and sworn enemy of his, who for years had been planning his destruction, that they, together with his open zeal for the Catholic religion, were enough to bring him to a bloody death, whereat the whole county mourned."* And what has all this to do with Shakespeare? We have already shown the intimacy of his grandmother and aunt, or cousin, with the Somervilles. And we have strong grounds for identifying the poet himself with one who for six years had lived in Edward Arden's family as a page; who, on the marriage of Somerville with Margaret Arden, in 1580, was begged by the young bridegroom to be his secretary and manager of his law affairs. If this idea should be well founded, then we should not only prove that Arden's story has a great deal to do with Shakespeare, but should also explain much that has hitherto been inexplicable in the poet's biography. For in stance: "Mr. Collier follows Malone in considering there is sufficient internal evidence in Shakespeare's plays to warrant the belief that he was employed in the office of an attorney after he had quitted the free-school. He says, 'Proofs of something like a legal education are to be found in many of his plays; and it may be safely asserted that they do not occur any thing like so frequently in the dramatic productions of his contemporaries." "+ If Shakespeare conducted the law business of Arden and Somerville, this difficulty is cleared up. He was young for the business, certainly; but he might have been as good a lawyer as his disguised Portia," the young doctor of Rome, the greatness of whose learning could not be enough commended; whose lack of years was no impediment to his reverend estimation; for never was there so young a body with so old a * For the sake of completeness, we will add Dugdale's account of Somerville (Warwickshire, p. 830), "who in 25 Eliz., being a hot-spirited gentleman, and about twenty-three years of age, but a Roman Catholic by profession, is said to have been so far transported with zeal for the restoring of that religion by the instigation of one Hall, a priest, that he resolved to kill the queen; and to that purpose made a journey to London: and that upon his apprehension he confessed his intent; but being arraigned, condemned, and committed to Newgate, within three days after he was found strangled in his lodging. How far forth he was guilty of this, God knows; for with what a high hand things were then borne, through the power of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is not unknown to most men; which earl had a particular spleen against Mr. Arden of Parkhall, father-in-law of this gentleman, as by sundry aged persons of credit I have often heard." The memory of the crime still lived in Warwickshire in Dugdale's days. Halliwell, p. 108. head:" we may fancy Shakespeare, like Nerissa, Portia's clerk, "A kind of boy, a little scrubbed boy, No higher than thyself, the judge's clerk ; A prating boy." Next, this will account for the enmity between Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Lucy, the tool of Leicester, the persecuting Puritan justice, who had Shakespeare "oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned; and at last made him fly his native county" for stealing his venison and rabbits, as the Rev. R. Davies writes eighty years after Shakespeare's death. Malone, Knight, and others, who cannot bear that any stain on the poet's morals should be believed, do all they can to overthrow this tradition. One thing they can never do, and that is, disprove that Sir Thomas Lucy is the Mr. Justice Shallow of Shakespeare's plays. "It must be conceded," says Halliwell, "that Sir Thomas Lucy had in some way or other persecuted the poet; for nothing short of a persecution would have provoked an attack from one elsewhere so moderate and gentle in the few notices he has recorded of his contemporaries." Lucy was the unscrupulous enemy of Arden, and the fawning flatterer of Leicester; he was the man who conducted the searches of Papists' premises in the latter part of 1583, when, as we have seen, the Catholics cleared their houses, and the young men fled into places of safety. This period is just that when it is most probable Shakespeare first had to run off to London, Thirdly, it was only a year and a quarter after this that his children, Hamlet and Judith, were born. He cannot, therefore, have been absent more than six months; venturing back when the persecution was over, but retaining his indignation in his heart, and making his poor friend Somerville his hero. For who but Somerville is the original of Hamlet? Great wits and madness are allied, as we all know. Somerville's madness is no argument of dullness. Like Hamlet, he concealed his determination to kill the prince under the natural mask of alienation of mind. Somerville was a man that had admirers among the admired; Charles Paget wrote to the Queen of Scots about him, and told her of "the great sorrow he had had to see his house ruinated, and his dear friend murdered, which God's enemies and his, by printed book, said he did himself." For it appears by Mary's protests to M. Mauvissiere, Jan. 5, 1584, that Walsingham had tried to use Somerville's pretended plot as a means of implicating her;—she takes God to witness that she had never heard the names of any of the persons condemned. The novel of Hamblet was before Shakespeare, and it is uncertain when his play was written; but it is clear that both name and plot occupied his mind at this time for to his two twin children, born early in 1585, he gave the names of Hamlet (Hanmet) and Judith, the mad conspirator and the valiant woman who had assassinated Holofernes, and for mentioning whose name in a prayer-book, Carter, the printer, had just been hanged.* Shakespeare lost his son Hamlet; but he has left us a more immortal creation, to commemorate at once the name of his child and the misfortunes of his friend. Fourthly, this is not inconsistent with the traditions concerning the poet. Thus Southwell writes in 1693: "The clerk that showed us the church is above eighty years old. He says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London, &c." Only suppose that Puritan tradition had transformed the would-be regicide and "sacrificer"‡ into a butcher, and we have the same tale. Aubrey improves upon this, by making the poet the son of a butcher; and he tells us that "there was another butcher's son in the town, his acquaintance and coetanean, that was held not at all inferior to him for natural wit, but died young." Is this a reminiscence of the promise of Somerville's youth? "When he killed a calf, he would do it in high style, and make a speech." Poor Somerville, when he was going to kill his calf, "would do it in high style, and make a speech," and so was cut short in his career; but how to apply the tradition to Shakespeare, we confess, puzzles us: however, Aubrey's authority is rejected by all writers of credit. The next tradition, though recorded by Aubrey, is quite in contradiction with the butcher story, when literally understood. "He had been in his younger years," says Mr. Beeston, "a schoolmaster in the county;" and we suppose that the page professed a little Latin as well as law in Arden's house. His escape would necessarily entail both poverty and privacy in London; and he might easily have been reduced both to assuming a false name, and to holding horses at the playhousedoor. Here we must suspend our investigations for the present, promising our readers to return to them as soon as possible. * Notice, too, how he protests against Puritanism by giving his two daughters, Susanna and Judith, names from the "apocrypha," which had been thrust out of the Bible by the divines of 1562. Halliwell, p. 88. ‡ "Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius." (Jul. Cæs. act ii. sc. 1.) 188 Reviews. MODERN POETS. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, Poet-Laureate. Tenth Edition. London: Moxon. 1855. (First published 1830) In Memoriam. By the same. Seventh Edition. London: Moxon. 1856. Maud. By the same. Festus: a Poem. By Philip James Bailey. Fifth Edition. London: Chapman and Hall. 1854. The Mystic, and other Poems. By the same. tion. 1855. London: Chapman. Second Edi The Minor Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A new Edition. London: Moxon. 1855. Poems. By Aubrey de Vere. London: Burns and Lambert. 1855. May Carols. By the same. London: Longmans. 1857. Poems. By Frederic William Faber, D.D. Second Edition. 1857. The Poetical Works of Henry W. Longfellow. A new Edition, illustrated by Gilbert. London: Routledge. 1857. The Masque of Mary, and other Poems. By Edward Caswall. London: Burns and Lambert. 1858. “THERE was a time,” says Dr. Brownson, in a late Number of his excellent Review," there was a time when we read and loved poetry, when we even thought we really could tell poetry if we found it: but we find so much praised nowadays as poetry, so much passing for poetry of the first order which in our younger days would hardly have been regarded as respectable prose, that we no longer dare undertake to decide, even for ourselves, what is or is not poetry." Very many persons have much the same feelings regarding our recent poets as Dr. Brownson. The poets have of late become so wonderfully eccentric, that they have quite bewildered the poor critics who undertake to sit in judgment upon them; and if those clear-headed gentlemen begin to waver, and get misty and unsettled too, what is the public to think? Shall we say that there is no such thing as poetry? or that there is such a thing as poetry, but that it is ineffable, and beggars description or defies definition? or that poetry is simply subjective, as the German slang phrases it; so that if 6 what is poetry to one man's mind is prose to another man's mind, and vice versá? Shall we discard the voice of antiquity, and make a new ars poetica to suit these times? But you wish for confusion worse confounded, go back to the Edinburgh Review of October 1856, where you may read as follows: "Poetry is an infinite subject; and an infinite number of clever things, true and false, have been said about it: 'It is the pleasure of a truth,' says Aristotle; 'It is the pleasure of a lie,' says Bacon. We, of course (the reviewer proceeds), side with Aristotle, who gave the Muse the worthiest praise she ever received when he wrote, Poetry is more philosophical and more deserving of attention than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, but history of particulars." However, Sir Philip Sidney seems, to our mind, to have given her greater praise still; for the article proceeds: "Sir Philip Sidney, in his defence of poetry, proves further that poetry is more philosophical than philosophy herself." The reviewer does not inform us how Sir Philip manages to establish his point; but goes on to tell us, in the words of" the poet," that "the spirit of poetry is in fact as broad and general as the casing air,' and that wheresoever there is interest properly human, there too may be poetry ;" and having recorded the clever things of other men, he proceeds to give his own clever thing, that "whatsoever stands immediately and obviously in relation to universal truth,-be it action or suffering, thought or emotion, a psychological fact or a phenomenon of nature, is perceived, by those who are able to appreciate that relation, to have within it a capability of being sung." Then at length comes a definition, which the reviewer calls a "rough definition," that "poetry is truth or fact of properly human, important, and general intelligibility, verbally expressed so as to affect the feelings." For instance, Smith says to his wife, "Dear me, what a horrible attempt this is which has just been made in Paris upon the life of the Emperor several persons seriously injured!" "Dear, dear, how shocking!" is the answer. And this is poetry, because Smith expresses verbally fact or truth of proper human import so as to affect Mrs. Smith's feelings. Nay, this expression of horror looks to something permanent; for as long as there shall be Smiths in the world, so long will the idea of assassination be a shock to their natural feelings: Smith is only an individual, but he speaks the sentiment of permanent humanity. We should not have mentioned this article, as it was published some time since, did it not express an opinion which has other supporters besides the reviewer. "We can hardly understand at the present day," says Mr. Matthew |