founded would have been very accept-great; but it was not visited with the able. Mr. Menzies could not have found rigor which certainly should have fallany difficulty in satisfying our natur- en upon the offender, who, if the deal curiosity on this point. That his tails here given are to be credited, was means of obtaining exclusive informa- simply banished the court and kingtion are greater than those at the dis- dom, in a note addressed to him by the posal of ordinary writers is made evi- Queen's own hand. We are further dent by a passage in which he tells told that the female attendants were us of what the Earl of Moray once bound to secrecy, and that Mary was said to himself when he was alone! satisfied with thus saving, as she supCommonly a person, when alone, does posed, Chastelar's life and her own not fall into talking with himself; a reputation. man in such a position may think, but he will not speak. Novelists even rarely make a character thus solely colloquial, and soliloquies on the stage are simply the methods by which the audience gets at the designs of him who is made by the author to speak aloud. To return, however, to Mary and the first of her luckless favorites.

It is evident that the madness of arrogance into which the young poet fell was lit up in him by a species of encouragement of his adoration on the part of the Queen, which seemed at least to say to him: "Who asketh faintly teacheth to deny." It was only when he construed that encouragement in a too fervent sense that the Queen's action might have been read by him as meaning: "He comes too near who comes to be denied." Similar encouragement, and similar misapprehension of what seemed encouragement, had previously exposed Mary Stuart to some very brutal wooing. One Captain Hepburn had addressed his homage to her with such unsentimental rudeness, that it is difficult to understand how the Tarquinian captain escaped the gallows. Of Chastelar's first act of felonious presumption there are two accounts. Mr. Menzies adopts that in which Chastelar, "proceeding from one impropriety to another," at length secreted himself in a closet in the Queen's bed-chamber, in which he was discovered by the indignant Mary herself. The second account saves her from this humiliation, without screening the crime of the offender. It is therein said that some of the Queen's female attendants found the poet concealed under the royal bed, and that they ejected him from the chamber before the Queen appeared. Either way, as we have said, the offense was equally

Chastelar, however, does not appear to have believed that the Queen's indignation was serious. He was so irreclaimably mad as to have some right to the pity which Mary felt. Nothing but madness, or a belief, which may be taken for a part of madness, that the Queen looked upon him with something of more tender quality than compassion, could have induced this man to commit the same offense twice. Yet, two nights after this scene in Edinburgh, the Queen, on her way to St. Andrew's, entered her sleeping-apartment at Burntisland, and as she did so, Chastelar issued from behind some hangings, and flung himself at her feet. That he could have got access to such a chamber bespeaks much negligence on the part of the attendants, or such custom on their side to see Chastelar wend whither he would, that they never thought of prohibiting him. Be this as it may, at this fresh offense Mary lost both patience and pity. At her screams, Moray, her half-brother, and a host of followers, rushed into the room, and the Queen's first eager cry was for. Moray to stab him. On the other hand, Chastelar lost something of his dignity if he replied, as is here stated, to the questioning of Moray, that he had come into the Queen's room "to take leave of her majesty before returning to France, for which I set out to-morrow." At the best, this must have been mere subterfuge, and it served no purpose. Moray, who cared little for Chastelar's life or his sister's reputation-willing rather to destroy both-ordered the poet to prison, and would not listen to any extenuating circumstances suggested on his behalf by Mary herself! The whole party, offender and offended, passed onward to St. Andrew's,

Knox, who detested him with all heartiness, says, "At the place of execution, when he saw that there was no remedy but death, he made a godly confession;" and Randolph asserts that he died with repentance: that he died with something too of the old troubador spirit, can not be denied. When he had concluded reciting the Hymn to Death, he turned, according to Brantome, in the direction of the place where he supposed the Queen to be, and exclaimed aloud: "Farewell, most beautiful and most cruel princess in the world!" And then, fearlessly offering his neck to the executioner, he allowed himself to be disposed of without difficulty.

where within three days the too pre- | nor confessor;" that is to say, neither suming poet was put upon his trial, Presbyterian nor Roman Catholic. But by way of preparation for his execution. During this investigation, "the Earl of Moray made repeated indirect attempts to lead him to make statements prejudicial to the Queen, urging him, with a show of candor and pretended regard for justice, to inform the court of any thing and every thing which he thought might be available in his defense, without regard to the rank and condition of those whom such statements might implicate. This language was too plain to be misunderstood. Every one present perceived that it contained a pointed allusion to the Queen. Chastelar, amongst the rest, felt that it did so;" and he first laid all the scandal to his own folly, and then ascribed it to the intensity of his love "for the noblest and loveliest of created beings."

This plea was not calculated to benefit the prisoner, who was forthwith condemned to be beheaded, and small time left him for shrift. Some of that time he passed, however, in taking leave of the Queen in mournfully tender verse. For this poetry Mary had no appetite; she had lost her old feeling of pity, and was as little inclined that Chastelar's life should be saved as Moray was. She withdrew to Holyrood before the execution, rejected an application for mercy, "and commanded the following couplet, inscribed by an unknown hand on the wall of her chamber, to be effaced:

'Sur front de roy
Que pardon soit!"

But there is a tradition that Mary connived at an attempt to effect Chastelar's escape.

Some accounts make this Dauphiny poet die with levity. It is evident that Chastelar encountered death in the spirit of a man who was without fear but not without feeling. He walked to the scaffold repeating the "Hymn to Death," by his friend Ronsard, in which are sung the pain and vanity of human desire, and the superior calm and content of death. This was something pagan, and Brantome records that Chastelar "employed no other spiritual book, nor minister,

Thus ended one of the most curious episodes in the history of those times. We have dealt with it at some length, because, though it be but an episode, it led to matters of greater historical importance. It excided a general desire that the Queen should place her honor under the safeguard of a second husband; and it led to that fatal marriage with Darnley-a weak, vain, diseased lad-which again was followed by the murder of a royal favorite, the cruel assassination of Mary's husband, and her re-marriage with the murderer, hot and bloody with his evil work. Other consequences ensued, which it is beyond our limits to narrate; but war, the sword, or the executioner is to be found in each succeeding episode of that miserable queen's most miserable life. As the question of Mary's immediate marriage would not have been so pertinaciously urged but for the scandal raised by Chastelar, we may at once see what misery arose out of the indiscretion of the Queen, who caused, if she did not encourage, the presumption of the poet. But we need not speculate on what might have been, but for this early fault in Mary's checkered career. The story, as it can be told from such authorities as exist, ist not narrated perhaps in all the fullness that the truth would bear. All that we are likely to obtain from state papers that may yet be discovered may not add much to help conclusions at which we have already arrived, con

tingently and conjecturally. We may guess that which may be hereafter proved; meanwhile, we are thankful for what we can get, and are especially thankful to all chroniclers who have power to condense their materials, who do not employ their imaginations in the elaboration of facts, who eschew affectation, who refrain from misappropriation of the labors of others, who have patience to weigh authorities, and sense and fairness in determining between conflicting evidence.

SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FAMILY.

A SKETCH BY THE EDITOR.

read it to them. The allotted evening had come. The family are together. The reading has been begun and progressed at some length. His wife and children are apparently much interested in the tragic story. They are all in a listening posture. The wife is looking up from her needle-work in fond admiration. Shakespeare seems to be repeating the language of the tragedy from memory, holding the manuscript in his hand while his eyes are turned, not upon the faces of his family, but upon some object in the room, perhaps to aid his memory in repeating what he had written. Without any positive knowledge on the subject, we may believe the truth of the representation in the engraving. It is, moreover, quite possible that had some visible or invisible photographer been present to take an impression of the scene, this may have been the truthful one.

Our object is simply to explain the engraving, and impart, as far possible, a sort of life-like impression to the mind of the reader. A brief biographical sketch of the family personages seems necessary-not so much of the father, whose history is well known, as concerning his wife, and especially their son and two daughters-for the purpose of adding interest to the engraving.

We offer to our readers, at the head of this number of THE ECLECTIC, a rare and beautiful engraving, representing a family scene of great interest and attraction. The principal personage is a prince among all the poets of the world. His name, his writings, his works and his fame will live as long as great thoughts, beautiful language and cardinal principles shall find a dwelling-place in the admiration of mankind. He opened the great gold mines and the silver mines of ideas, and brought out their priceless treasures, and coined them into a literary cur- William Shakespeare, the national rency for all coming ages. The genius, dramatist of England, was the son of the wisdom, the talents and the pro- John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, and ductions of Shakespeare have never per- was born at Stratford-on-Avon, Warhaps been equaled by any man not di- wickshire, on April twenty-third, 1564, vinely inspired. Foremost in the grand as averred by tradition-being St. literary phalanx, the banner of Shake- George's day, the anniversary of the speare waves on high above all his com- patron saint of England. His baptism peers, while around his standard he ral- is recorded three days afterward in the lies all the champions in the field of in- parish register, preserved in the Strattellect and mental progress. But giant ford church, where it may still be pens in past ages have written his eulo- seen by the traveler. The house and gy, and it is akin to presumption to at- the chamber in which the great bard tempt to say more. Our readers will was born, are objects of intense interpardon us thus far. Our object is sim- est. On the window in the room may ply to introduce them or present them to Shakespeare and his family at their home at Stratford-upon-Avon. We suppose it was on some evening about 1600. Shakespeare had been engaged for some time in writing the tragedy of Hamlet. He had perhaps completed it. Desiring to please and gratify his wife and children, he had proposed to

be seen scratched Sir Walter Scott's well-known signature and the famous name of William M. Thackeray. In regard to the accuracy of Shakespeare's portrait as seen in the engraving, we can only say it corresponds in a great degree to the bust of the poet at Stratford, and with all the best portraits we have seen. We pass over the child

and pretty garden and the little orchard near by. A vine climbs up the wall of the house to which Shakespeare used to come love-making to Miss Anne. The reader can examine her portrait in the engraving and decide for himself the quality of her beauty and intellect as best he may. The scene in the engraving may be considered historic. It is a subject for careful study. Shakespeare died on his fifty-second birthday, of a fever. Anne survived her husband seven years, and was buried in the same church at Stratford. Susanna, the wife of Dr. Hall, a principal physician at Stratford, died July elev

other daughter, died in 1662, at the age of seventy-seven. She left three sons, who all died without issue. Thus, in fifty-four years, the lineal descendants of Shakespeare became extinct.

hood and youth of Shakespeare as not needful to our explanation of the engraving. At the age of eighteen, he was a handsome, well-made young man, hazel-eyed and auburn-haired, with all his natural gifts superadded to his wonted elasticity of spirits and frankness of youth. He was an object of interest and attraction to the fair maidens of Stratford. But not there did he find a wife. In the little hamlet of Shottery, about a mile to the west of Stratford, dwelt Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a substantial yeoman. Her, Shakespeare wooed and won when in his nineteenth year, while Anne had reached the maturer age of twenty-enth, 1649, aged sixty-six. Judith, the seven. They were married at Worcester, the seat of the diocese in which Stratford is situated. The eldest child was a daughter, who was named Susanna, who afterward became the wife of Dr. Hall, of Stratford. She appears in the engraving leaning on her father's shoulder, with elbows resting on the table. Her baptism is recorded in the parish register on May twenty-sixth, 1783. This would make her age to be about seventeen, by supposition, at the scene in the engraving. The only other issue of the marriage were twins, a boy and a girl. Their names were Hamnet and Judith, who were baptized February second, 1585. Hamnet, the son, must have died soon after the time of the scene in the engraving, where he appears about fifteen years of age, a lad of a fine countenance. Judith, his twin sister, lived to be the wife of Thomas Quincy, of Stratford, a wine-merchant. In the engraving, Hamnet appears standing and listening, while Judith is sitting on a low seat, leaning on her father's knee, gazing up into his face.

The cottage in which Anne Hathaway resided, still exists at Shottery, and presents, at the present day, nearly the same appearance that it did in the time of Shakespeare. There is the neat NEW SERIES-VOL. III. No. 1

We close this brief explanation sketch with a pleasant incident in the life of the great bard, which illustrates his adroitness and courtly tact.

Shakespeare was personating on one occasion the character of a king in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, who, in walking across the stage, the honored place in those days for the higher classes of the audience, dropped her glove as she passed close to the poet. No notice was taken by him of the incident; and the Queen, desirous of knowing whether this procedure was the result of mere inadvertence, or a determination to preserve the consistency of his part, moved again toward him, and again let her glove fall. Shakespeare stooped down to pick it up, saying, in the character of the monarch whom he was personating:

"And though now bent on this high embassy, Yet stoop we to take up our cousin's glove."

He then retired from the stage and presented the glove to the Queen, who is reported to have been highly pleased.

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