‘Let the woman take An elder than herself: so wears she to him; So sways she level in her husband’s heart: For, boy (however we do praise ourselves), Our fancies are more giddy and infirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, Than women’s are. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.’ But do not put too much faith in the biographical value of literary expression, nor assume that these views have much bearing upon Shakespeare’s married life. His sonnets breathed love and passion for ladies dark or fair, and very various; but then ’twas his trade to assume what he did not feel, and to trick it out in glowing pages of dainty poesy. I, for one, would not regard them nor their like as arguments or evidence in favour of divorce. So, in all charity to sweet Will, let us scout the suggestion of a writer who wrote some years since on the unhappy marriages of men of genius, even as I do here, that ‘we have the internal evidence of his sonnets that he was not a faithful husband.’ We had far better keep to the scanty facts which have come down to us respecting Shakespeare’s life. We know, for instance, that he left Stratford-on-Avon and settled in London but four years after his marriage. It cannot be said with certainty whether or not his wife came up with him from Warwickshire, but it is likely enough that she did not. And yet can we reasonably blame any one less impersonal than Thalia or Melpomene for his leaving his wife behind him in that old town beside the Avon? I would suppose that Ann Hathaway was uncongenial to him in so far that, and because she had no sort of appreciation of, nor any love of, the medium of words in which her husband worked. It was not until he had reached his forty-eighth year that Shakespeare returned to his native town. He lived there with his wife and his daughter Judith for four years, and then died. Dryden’s wife must have been, no less than Carlyle, ‘gey ill to live wi’.’ He married, in his thirty-third year, the Lady Eliza Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman whose intellect was as cloudy as her reputation, and whose violence ofttimes caused the poet to wish her dead. He wrote an epitaph in anticipation of that consummation he most devoutly wished; but she survived him, and, singularly enough, the epitaph which was never used has survived them both to the present day. He said-- ‘Here lies my wife; here let her lie; Now she’s at rest--and so am I.’ And so they are.