His Life and Genius 119 



at a critical moment, rescued from peril recklessly 

 provoked : in the mysterious fate of things 

 Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd. 



That his wife and children whom he left 

 behind him at Stratford must have been depen- 

 dent on her relations for support is pretty certain, 

 seeing that he was not at first in a position to 

 maintain them, as he no doubt did so soon as 

 he began to prosper. The supposition is perhaps 

 confirmed by two curious facts : first, that the 

 only mention made of his wife after her marriage 

 is as having borrowed 40s. from Thomas Whit- 

 tington, who had been her father's shepherd, 

 payment of which his executors, after his death 

 in 1601, had to enforce from the poet ; secondly, 

 that his daughter Judith (twin sister of his son 

 Hammeth), born in 1585, attested the signature 

 of a deed of conveyance in 1611 by her mark, 

 whereas his eldest child Susannah wrote a firm 

 and vigorous hand and was said to be " witty 

 above her sex." For one reason or another, at 

 any rate, the one had been taught to write, the 

 other apparently had not. 



The eager haste of enthusiastic admirers to dis- 

 credit the stories of his youthful indiscretions 

 savours of uninstructed feeling rather than of 

 instructed understanding : they would have a 

 divine poet to have been a divine boy, and 

 thenceforth divine in all his doings, which is 

 absurd. One may say, as Plutarch reports The- 

 mistocles to have once said, " A ragged colt 



