1 48 Shakspeare 



application was doubtless made at the instance 

 of his son, who conveyed to him the necessary 

 qualification, and in the year following himself 

 purchased the best house in Stratford. A grant 

 of armorial bearings Shakspeare subsequently 

 solicited and obtained from the Court of Arms, and 

 retained, although some of its grants then made 

 to other players were afterwards cancelled as 

 scandals. Such was the mortal ambition of the 

 great immortal : to possess land and houses, to 

 enjoy the blazonry of a coat-of-arms, to entail a 

 real estate on the eldest son of the family through 

 successive descents. The result we know was 

 failure. He most heeded apparently that which 

 he did not gain, but gained that of which, being 

 assured, he took little heed. No one, not even a 

 Shakspeare nor Goethe, emancipates himself from 

 the social atmosphere of his time and place ; be 

 the human ever so great it is still not super- 

 human ; earth-planted feet tread the ground, 

 however sky-aspiring the thought. 



2. Sonnets. 



Whoever was the mysterious " W. H.," " the 

 onlie begetter " of the Sonnets, one thing is plain, 

 that they were addressed to a person of high 

 social rank and of such cultivated intelligence as 

 to be worth the homage and to appreciate their 

 worth,* no doubt one of the young gallants of 



* And they might well be addressed to William Herbert, 

 Earl of Pembroke, having regard to their matter and his 



