In later years the poet bought another twenty acres of arable land to add to his already considerable holding. All these purchases were made while he was a very busy man--actor, playwright, and manager. Doubtless he had other investments and interests, of which we may some day know a little more than we do now. Fresh documents relating to his investments in the theatrical world were published as recently as the closing months of 1909, and the records of the reign of Elizabeth and James I. are by no means fully examined. One truth stands out clearly through the interesting story of Shakespeare's investments, and that is his love for the town in which he was born. With so large a share of the world to choose from, with countless associations that might well have kept him in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, with friends in Court circles and acting circles who would scarcely be accessible in a town three, four, or even five days' journey from London, he seems to have had the fixed intent of spending his years of ease at home. There is too much reason to believe that with him marriage was a failure. Reference has been made already to the birth of his daughter Susanna, who became Mrs. Hall, and we know that in 1585 his wife bore twins, boy and girl, Hamnet and Judith, named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, friends of John Shakespeare. But the poet saw little of his family or of the three children of his union, and at the time of his public return to Stratford little Hamnet Shakespeare died, in his twelfth year. Susanna married, in 1607, the Puritan physician John Hall. Judith the twin married Mr. Thomas Quiney in the year of her father's death. The poet seems to have lived on excellent terms with his daughters, but there must be some justification for the generally accepted story of unhappy married life. Had he been devoted to his wife, Shakespeare could have sent for her when he had been a very few years in London; the fact that he did not go back to her for eleven years has a significance that takes a great deal of explaining away, nor are the laboured explanations of the people who assume that the life of genius is perfect, worth the ink and paper devoted to them. The estrangement might have been the fault of the man, or his wife, or both; it is a matter that ceased to be important when one or both had died. We make our conjectures and pass on; others come to do the same; but the first is likely to be as far from the truth as the last. We do not find any reliable information that can clear the darkness enshrouding the poet's life; even Aubrey's "Lives of Eminent Men," in which the poet is described as "handsome and well shaped," was written more than fifty years after his death, and was founded upon the gossip of an old actor.