To the favour of this worthy gentleman I owe the knowledge of one particular, in honour of our poet’s once dwelling-house, of which, I presume, Mr. Rowe never was apprized. When the civil war raged in England, and king Charles the First’s queen was driven by the necessity of affairs to make a recess in Warwickshire, she kept her court for three weeks in New-place. We may reasonably suppose it then the best private house in the town; and her majesty preferred it to the college, which was in the possession of the Combe family, who did not so strongly favour the king’s party.
How much our author employed himself in poetry, after his retirement from the stage, does not so evidently appear: very few posthumous sketches of his pen have been recovered to ascertain that point. We have been told, indeed, in print, but not till very lately, that two large chests full of this great man’s loose papers and manuscripts, in the hands of an ignorant baker of Warwick (who married one of the descendants from our Shakespeare) were carelessly scattered and thrown about as garret-lumber and litter, to the particular knowledge of the late Sir William Bishop, till they were all consumed in the general fire and destruction of that town. I cannot help being a little apt to distrust the authority of this tradition: because his wife survived him seven years, and as his favourite daughter Susanna survived her twenty-six years, it is very improbable they should suffer such a treasure to be removed, and translated into a remoter branch of the family, without a scrutiny first made into the value of it. This, I say, inclines me to distrust the authority of the relation: but, notwithstanding such an a improbability, if we really lost such a treasure, by whatever fatality or caprice of fortune they came into such ignorant and neglectful hands, I agree with the relater, the misfortune is wholly irreparable.
To these particulars, which regard his person and private life, some few more are to be gleaned from Mr. Rowe’s Account of his Life and Writings: let us now take a short view of him in his publick capacity as a writer: and, from thence, the transition will be easy to the state in which his writings have been handed down to us.
No age, perhaps, can produce an author more various from himself, than Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged to be. The diversity in stile, and other parts of composition, so obvious in him, is as variously to be accounted for. His education, we find, was at best but begun: and
