The deepest of the Shakespeare mysteries is, to my mind, the silence of those closing years. Were nerves and brain temporarily exhausted from the strain of that long period of continuous production? Or had he come home from London sore at heart, "toss'd from wrong to injury," smarting from "the whips and scorns of time" and abjuring the "rough magic" of his art? Or was he, in "the sessions of sweet silent thought," dreaming on some high, consummate poem in comparison with which the poor stage-smirched plays seemed to him not worth the gathering up? Or might he, taking a leaf out of Ben Jonson's book, have been in fact arranging and rewriting his works, purging his gold from the dross of various collaborators? Or was some new, inmost revelation of life dawning upon him, holding him dumb with awe? We can only ask, not answer; but certainly they err who claim that the divinest genius of English letters had wrought merely for house and land, and found his chief reward in writing "Gentleman" after his name. "Sure, he that made us with such large discourse Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To rust in us unus'd." Shakespeare had been gentle before he was a gentleman, and had held ever--let his own words bear witness!-- "Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches." The gods had given him but fifty-two years on earth--had they granted more, he might have probed and uttered too many of their secrets--when for the last time he was "with holy bell ... knoll'd to church." It was an April day when the neighbours bore a hand-bier--as I saw a hand-bier borne a few years since across the fields from Shottery--the little way from New Place down Chapel Lane and along the Waterside--or perhaps by Church Street--and up the avenue, beneath its blossoming limes, to Holy Trinity. Here, where the thousands and the millions come up to do reverence to this "Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame," I passed a peaceful hour, ruffled only--if the truth must out--by the unjustifiable wrath which ever rises in me on reading Mrs. Susanna Hall's epitaph. I can forgive the "tombemaker" who wrought the bust, I can endure the stained-glass windows, I can overlook the alabaster effigy of John Combe in Shakespeare's chancel, but I resent the Puritan self-righteousness of the lines,-- "Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that but this Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse." Yes, I know that Shakespeare made her his heiress, that she was clever and charitable, that in July of 1643 she entertained Queen Henrietta Maria at New Place, but I do not care at all for the confusion of her bones when "a person named Watts" intruded into her grave fifty-eight years after she had taken possession, and I believe she used her father's manuscripts for wrapping up her saffron pies.