This poetry is from the same source whence
flowed, in sombre sweetness, the grand, the
dark and melancholy stream of Hamlet !

In the intervals of producing these gems, of
which there are a number, their author lived a
profane and vulgar life, as Emerson justly calls
it. Even tradition fails to give the least sparkle
of spirituality, the least sign of moral elevation,
to those years of opulence at Stratford, as to the
years before them. His most notable act was to
obtain on two occasions by flagrant fraud, with
the complicity of the Garter King of Arms, a
g^oss rascal, named John Dethick, a grant of
armorial bearings to which he had no right
whatever ; a transaction which caused bitter



HAMLET'S NOTE-BOOK. 75

complaint against the management of the Her-
ald's College, although it refused to confirm
Dethick's action in both instances. For the rest,
he ate, drank, caroused, slept ; he speculated in
tithes, in land, and steadily fattened. He never
published his plays, nor made any claim to their
authorship, then or at any time. Mr. White
has the effrontery to say in the article, that in
his Ufetime he claimed them as his. He never
at any time made the faintest claim to their au-
thorship ; never ! He never set up any title to
them, and they were first published in collected
form, affiliated upon his name, seven years after
his death, in 1623, the same time in which Bacon
was collecting and pubUshing his works in their
final form for posterity. He had no boohs. His
will shows the fact. He leaves houses, lands,
messuages, orchards, gardens, wearing-apparel,
furniture, a sword, a silver and gilt punch-bowl,
a second-best bed for his wife, — no books. He
had twenty thousand dollars a year and not
a volume. The man who wrote Love's Labor 's
Lost, so learned, so academic, so scholastic in
expression and allusion that it is unfit for pop-
ular representation, — the man whose ample page
is rich with the transfigured spoils of ages, — that
man lived without a library ! Finally, in 1616,
he died of a fever, the result of a drunken orgy
at Stratford with some congenial tosspots. This,
in brief, is his record ; a record unadorned by a
single excellence or virtue. Before it, thought-



76 HAMLET'S NOTE-BOOK.
