Shakspere is thought to have been penurious for his litigious strivings point in that direction, but this feature of his character was not disclosed in 1596 and 1599, when he sought to have his family enrolled among the gentry, as shown by his extravagance in bribing the officers of the Herald College to issue a grant of arms to his father, “a transaction which involved,” says Dr. Farmer, “the falsehood and venality of the father, the son and two kings-at-arms, and did not escape protest, for if ever a coat was cut from whole cloth we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one.” Shakspere himself was not in a position to apply for a coat-of-arms—“a player stood far too low in the social scale for the cognizance of heraldry.” Nevertheless, recent writers on the subject of Shakespeare stamp this bogus coat-of-arms on the covers of their books. We know that the Shaksperes did not belong to the Armigerous part of the population, and that they stood somewhat lower in the social scale than either the Halls or Quineys, who bore marital relations with them. Shakspere’s son-in-law, John Hall, was a master of arts and an eminent physician. He was summoned more than once to attend the Earl and Countess of Northampton at Ludlow Castle. He was of the French Court School, and was opposed to the indiscriminate process of bleeding. On June 5, 1607, Dr. Hall was married at Stratford-on-Avon to Shakspere’s eldest daughter, Susanna. Stratford then contained about fifteen hundred inhabitants. One hundred sixty-two years later, Garrick gave his unsavory description of Stratford-on-Avon as “the most dirty, unseemly, ill-paved, wretched-looking town in all Britain.” Cottages of that day in Stratford consisted of mud walls and thatched roofs. “At this period and for many generations afterwards the sanitary conditions of the thoroughfares of Stratford-on-Avon were simply terrible.” On February 10, 1616, Thomas Quiney, a vintner, and also an accomplished scholar and penman, was married at Stratford church to Judith, Shakspere’s younger daughter, who could neither read nor write. The marriage ceremony took place without a license or proclaiming the bans. For this breach of ecclesiastical procedure both the parties were summoned to the court at Worcester and threatened with excommunication. When the fortune hunter goes forth to woe, and is determined to win, he is content to wade through reeking refuse and muckheaps to marry a rich heiress and does not much care if her histrionic father by XXXIX Elizabeth were a vagabond.