* We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White's article on Shakespeare in Appleton's "American Cyclopoedia." Mr. White's admirable contributions to our Shakespearean literature entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted question as to William Shakespeare; and we must confess that, in some portions, his paper we have just mentioned almost suggests him as agreeing with us as to his subject. Mr. White says, in another place: "Young lawyers and poets produced plays rapidly. Each theatrical company not only 'kept a poet,' but had three or four, in its pay. At the time of his leaving Stratford the drama was rising rapidly in favor with all classes in London, where actors were made much of in a certain way. And where there was a constant demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and the inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by supplying this demand." And again: "We are tolerably well informed by contemporary writers as to the performances of the eminent actors of that time, but of Shakespeare's we read nothing." Mr. White admits, a few lines below the sentence just quoted, that Shakespeare's position in the stock at the Blackfriars was "general utility." We should rather call it, from the evidence, "first old man." {085}II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Susannah Hall, presumably by one of the family, which read:= ```"Witty above her sex, but that's not all: ```Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall. ```Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this ```Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss."= Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or both, were "witty above their sex" or "wise to salvation," cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would seem that this is all the immediate family of William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries.