ignorance of Shakespeare’s life:  nay, it is with a mingled thankfulness and sorrowful sympathy that we contemplate them wasting the light of the blessed sun (when it shines in England) and wearing out good eyes (or better barnacles) in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments on which they are written and as dry as the dust that covers them.  But although we gladly concede that these labors have resulted in the diffusion of a knowledge of the times and the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity, we cannot accept the documents which have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly printed,—­the extracts from parish-registers and old account-books,—­not Shakespeare’s,—­the inventories, the last wills and testaments, the leases, the deeds, the bonds, the declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters,—­as having aught to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare.  We hunger, and we receive these husks; we open our months for bread, and break our teeth against these stones.  As to the law-pleadings, what have their discords, in linked harshness long drawn out, to do with the life of him whom his friends delighted to call Sweet Will?  We wish that they at least had been allowed to rest.  Those who were parties to them have been more than two centuries in their graves,—­

“Secure from worldly chances and mishaps. There lurks no treason, there no envy swells, There grow no damned grudges; there no storms, No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.”

Why awaken the slumbering echoes of their living strife?

[Footnote A:  Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker, commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:—­Elegant phraseology, though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which, as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to remark, is there used by the best writers.  Akin to it is another mode of expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g., “immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage,” meaning, as soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately went upon the stage.  As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay, alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid construction to the graces of his style.]

Yet these very law-papers, in the reduplicated folds of which dead quarrels lie embalmed in hideous and grotesque semblance of their living shapes, their lifeblood dried that lent them all their little dignity, their action and their glow, and exhaling only a faint, sickening odor of the venom that has kept them from crumbling into forgetfulness,—­these law-papers are now held by some to have special interest Shakespeare-ward,