of Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe." In the meantime he had smoothed the declining years of his father and had followed him with love and duty to the grave. Other domestic bereavements likewise befell him, and other worldly cares and duties were laid upon his hands, but neither grief nor business could check the fertility of his brain. Within the next ten years he wrote, among other great plays, _Othello, Lear, Macbeth, _and _Coriolanus._ ¹ Jonson's famous comedy was first acted in 1598, "By the then Lord Chamberlain his servants." Knowell is designated as "an old gentleman." The Jonson Folio of 1692 names as follows the principal comedians who acted in that piece: "Will. Shakespeare. Aug. Philips. Hen. Condel. Will. Slye. Will. Kempe. Ric. Burbadge. Joh. Hemings. Tho. Pope. Chr. Beston. Joh. Duke." At about forty-eight he seems to have disposed of his interest in the two London theatres with which he had been connected, the Blackfriars and the Globe, and shortly afterwards, his work as we possess it being well-nigh completed, he retired finally to his Stratford home. That he was the comrade of many bright spirits who glittered in "the spacious times" of Elizabeth several of them have left personal testimony. That he was the king of them all is shown in his works. The Sonnets seem to disclose that there was a mysterious, almost a tragical, passage in his life, and that he was called to bear the burden of a great and perhaps a calamitous personal grief--one of those griefs, which, being caused by sinful love, are endless in the punishment they entail. Happily, however, no antiquarian student of Shakespeare's time has yet succeeded in coming near to the man. While he was in London he used to frequent the Falcon Tavern, in Southwark, and the Mermaid, and he lived at one time in St. Helen's parish, Aldersgate, and at another time in Clink Street, Southwark. As an actor his name has been associated with his characters of Adam, Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost of King Hamlet, and a contemporary reference declared him "excellent in the quality he professes." Some of his manuscripts, it is possible, perished in the fire that consumed the Globe theatre in 1613. He passed his last days in his home at Stratford, and died there, somewhat suddenly, on his fifty-second birthday. That event, it may be worth while to observe, occurred within thirty-three years of the execution of Charles the First, under the Puritan Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan spirit, intolerant of the play-house and of all its works, must then have been gaining formidable strength. His daughter Susanna, aged thirty-three at the time of his death, survived him thirty-three years. His daughter Judith, aged thirty-one at the time of his death, survived him forty-six years. The whisper of tradition says that both were Puritans. If so the strange and seemingly unaccountable disappearance of whatever play-house papers he may have left at Stratford should not be obscure.