Now, of course, this _him_ must mean her Saviour, with whom she is in Paradise; yet, it may mean, for all that, her father Shakspeare; and the question is, was not the ambiguity a quaint conceit, and intended to be a doublet? If so, as it has often struck me, whatever we may think of its taste, it is an important testimony to the maturer character of the poet; since its secondary meaning would be, to give it in paraphrase—that her wit had something in it of Shakspeare, but that her piety was wholly learned of her father, with whom she now reaps its reward. Now if we exclude this idea, it would almost seem to force us into the sad reverse; for certainly, as it is first read, it seems to imply that she was not indebted to her father for any of her religion, though she was for her wit. Of course, it may be answered, that _wisdom unto salvation_ is so exclusively from Christ, as its meritorious cause, that nothing else is to be taken into account, as its instrument; but is this the sole idea of the verse? Very likely; and yet after all, I wonder that its ambiguous character has never attracted the attention of the many who have raked and scraped the very dust of Stratford for something rich and strange. Certain it is, that, like many readings of Shakspeare himself, it wants but a change of emphasis, from word to word, to give two or three different senses, any one of which is tolerable, although it is an intolerably bad epitaph, after all. I believe the droppings of this Church of Stratford bedew the works of Shakspeare, from the first sonnet to the last play, and that here he was schooled to that strict law of his dramas, which runs through all, and by which he always “shows virtue her own feature, and scorn her own image,” instead of fitting the mask of propriety upon the front of shame. More than all, it was here that he learned that reverence for the name of Jesus, with which he so often embalms his pages, and which so often makes them melodious to a believer’s ear and heart. How much, too, the first and second lesson out of “the Bishop’s Bible”—how much the Epistle and Gospel, and the Psalter, taught him, not only of sonorous English, but of Christian doctrine and morals! I am sure these influences may be detected in his works; and as I looked at the very spot where his young idea was taught to shoot toward heaven, I felt that this was the sublimest association of the place. Here once (my fancy suggested) he may have heard in the lesson for the day—_suffer chyldren to come unto Me_, and then, a few verses afterwards, he must have been struck with the contrast, when the parson read on—_it is easier for a camell to go thorow a nedle’s eye_, etc. He was now a prosperous man, and had just purchased New-Place, and obtained a grant of Arms. His conscience therefore pricked him with the question—Was he one of the rich men for whom admission into heaven was to be so hard? The parson mounted the pulpit, and quoted much learned stuff out of Sir John