ii4 Shakspeare 



prosperity did not endure ; business went badly 

 with him after a time, and gradually from bad to 

 worse. In 1577-8, when his son William was thir- 

 teen years old, he was taxed to pay only half what 

 other aldermen paid, and in November of that 

 year he was exempted from any payment, having 

 no goods to distrain on. In the same year he 

 mortgaged his wife's inheritance to Edmund 

 Lambert, to whom then also he became indebted 

 for five pounds borrowed on security, and in 1592 

 he was prosecuted as a recusant for not going 

 once a month to the Parish Church, presumably 

 because of debt and fear of process. 



The story of his father's failure points to a 

 fault of character in him which the son happily 

 did not inherit directly. Like many other 

 eminent men he doubtless owed much to his 

 mother's part in him, either directly or inter- 

 mediately through fortunate compositions or 

 neutralizations of qualities in the combining 

 parental germs. It was she probably who en- 

 dowed him with the rich affective qualities of 

 his nature, his sympathetic feeling and imagi- 

 nation, whereby he became the great poet he 

 was. In whichever line, paternal or maternal, 

 fault or virtue was ingraft, certain it is that he, 

 like every great genius, was the brilliant blossom- 

 ing of a modest line of obscure ancestors, whose 

 sober thought and feeling, silently stored, now 

 emerging from the dark, came to light and life 

 in him. In them — in whom, so to speak, he 



