The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859

(A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes);
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impanelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The clear Eye's moiety, and the dear Heart's part;
As thus: Mine Eye's due is thine outward part,
And my Heart's right, thine inward love of heart."

It would seem, indeed, as if passages like these must be received as evidence that Shakespeare had more familiarity with legal phraseology, if not a greater knowledge of it, than could have been acquired except by habitual use in the course of professional occupation. But let us see if he is peculiar even in this crowding of many law-terms into a single brief passage. We turn to the very play open at our hand, from which we have quoted before, (and which, by the way, we have not selected as exceptional in this regard,) "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," and find the following passage in Act V.:—

"Doctor. Now, Sir, from this your oath and bond, Faith's pledge and seal of conscience, you have run, Broken all contracts, and forfeiture Justice hath now in suit against your soul: Angels are made the jurors, who are witnesses Unto the oath you took; and God himself, Maker of marriage, He that hath seal'd the deed, As a firm lease unto you during life, Sits now as Judge of your transgression: The world informs against you with this voice.– If such sins reign, what mortals can rejoice? Scarborow. What then ensues to me? Doctor. A heavy doom, whose execution's Now served upon your conscience," etc. p. 91, D.O.P., Ed. 1825.

Indeed, the hunting of a metaphor or a conceit into the ground is a fault characteristic of Elizabethan literature, and one from which Shakespeare's boldness, no less than his genius, was required to save him; and we have seen already how common was the figurative use of law-phrases among the poets and dramatists of his period. Hamlet's speech and the Forty-sixth Sonnet cannot, therefore, be accepted as evidence of his attorneyship, except in so far as they and like passages may be regarded as giving some support to the opinion that Shakespeare was but one of many in his time who abandoned law for letters.

For we object not so much to the conclusion at which Lord Campbell arrives as to his mode of arriving at it. His method of investigation, which is no method at all, but the mere noting of passages in the order in which he found them in looking through Shakespeare's works, is the rudest and least intelligent that could have been adopted; and his inference, that, because Shakespeare makes Jack Cade lament that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and affirm that it is not the bee, but the bee's wax, that stings, therefore he must have been employed to write deeds on parchment and append wax to them in the form of seals, is a fair specimen both of the acuteness and the logic which his Lordship displays in this his latest effort to unite Law and Literature.

There are, however, very considerable grounds for the opinion that Shakespeare had more than a layman's acquaintance with the technical language of the law. For it must be admitted, in the first place, that he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it. That other playwrights and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him alone. But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare's use of them furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical language of conveyancing and pleading also indicates no more than an ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare's would manifestly strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity with it was acquired as they acquired theirs. This position is, to say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling to assume. For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any, more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do about him. It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted from the "Miseries of Enforced Marriage," was not a practising attorney or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play. On the contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many other dramatic authors of the period when he flourished, (1600-1620,) and of the whole Elizabethan period, (1575-1625,) were nestling attorneys or barristers before they became full-fledged dramatists.

We are not without contemporary evidence upon this point. Thomas Nash, friend to Robert Greene, a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose works were in vogue just before Shakespeare wrote, in an "Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of the Two Universities," with which, according to the fashion of the time, he introduced Greene's "Menaphon" (1587)[5 - Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce's indisputable authority. Greene's Works. Vol. I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii.] to the reader, has the following paragraph:—

"I will turn my back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our trivial translators. It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need; yet English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as, Blood is a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches. But, oh grief! Tempus edax rerum,—what is that will last always? The sea, exhaled by drops, will, in continuance, be dry; and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage."

It has most unaccountably been assumed that this passage refers to Shakespeare;[6 - It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,—one or more of them,—whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream.] and it is even so cited by Lord Campbell himself,—to our surprise, when we remember his professional training and experience as a sifter of evidence. But, as far as regards its reference to a leaving of law for literature, it is clearly of general application. Nash says, "It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, etc., to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves," etc. By the trade of Noverint he meant that of an attorney. The term was not uncommonly applied to members of that profession, because of the phrase, Noverint universi per presentes, (Know all men by these presents,) with which deeds, bonds, and many other legal instruments then began. And Nash's testimony accords with what we know of the social and literary history of the age. There was no regular army in Elizabeth's time; and the younger sons of gentlemen and well-to-do yeomen, who received from their fathers little more than an education and a very small allowance, and who did not become either military or maritime adventurers, opening their oyster with a sword, entered the Church or the profession of the law in its higher or lower grade; and as at that period there was much more demand for lawyers and much less for clergymen than there is now, and the Church had ceased to be a stepping-stone to political power and patronage, while the law had become more than ever before an avenue to fame, to fortune, and to rank, by far the greater number of these young gentlemen aspired to the woolsack. But then, as now, the early years of professional life were seasons of sharp trial and bitter disappointment. Necessity pressed sorely or pleasure wooed resistlessly, and the slender purse wasted rapidly away while the young attorney or barrister awaited the employment that did not come. He knew then, as now he knows, "the rich man's scorn, the proud man's contumely"; nay, he felt, as now he sometimes feels, the tooth of hunger gnawing through the principles and firm resolves that partition a life of honor and self-respect from one darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by open shame. Happy,– yet, perhaps, oh, unhappy,—he who now in such a strait can wield the pen of a ready writer!—for the press, perchance, may afford him a support which, though temporary and precarious, will hold him up until he can stand upon more stable ground. But in the reigns of Good Queen Bess and Gentle Jamie there was no press. There was, however, an incessant demand for new plays. Play-going was the chief intellectual recreation of that day for all classes, high and low. It filled the place of our newspapers, our books, our lectures, our concerts, our picture-seeing, and, in a great measure, of our social gatherings and amusements, of whatever nature. It is hardly extravagant to say, that there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year. To play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated, entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and their condition. They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular plays for them on festal days. What more natural, then, than that those who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts, should give themselves up to play-writing! As do the great, so will the small. What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do. The players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic in the matter of play-making. If a play filled the house, they did not trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who wrote it; and thus came about that "common practice" for "shifting companions" to "leave the trade of Noverint" and "busy themselves with the endeavors of art"; and hence it is that the plays of the period of which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law.

One reason for the regarding of Nash's sneer as especially directed against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, "whole Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches," which has been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. But the earliest edition of "Hamlet" known was published in 1603, and even this is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of the play. That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impossibility; and Nash's allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play, (which is not certain.) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his "Hamlet."

We have, then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the dramatic literature of that age.

But the question, then, arises,—and it is one which, under the circumstances, must be answered,—To what must we attribute the fact, that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580 and 1620, Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect? For it is true, that, among all the dramatic writers of that period, whose works have survived, not one uses the phraseology of the law with the frequency, the freedom, and the correctness of Shakespeare. Beaumont, for instance, was a younger son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, and, following the common routine that we have noticed, after leaving the University, became an Inns-of-Court man, but soon abandoned law for literature; his friend and associate, Fletcher, was the son of a bishop, but had an uncle who was a lawyer and a diplomatist, and is himself believed to have been of the Inns of Court. Rich gleanings of law-terms might, therefore, be expected from the plays written by these dramatists; yet it may safely be asserted, that from Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays at least twice as many passages marked by legal phraseology might be produced, as from the fifty-four written by Beaumont and Fletcher, together or alone! a fact the great significance of which is heightened by another,—that it is only the vocabulary of the law to the use of which Shakespeare exhibits this proclivity. He avails himself, it is true, of the peculiar language of the physician, the divine, the husbandman, the soldier, and the sailor; but he uses these only on very rare occasions, by way of description, comparison, or illustration, when something in the scene or the subject in hand suggests them. But the technical language of the law runs from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought. The word "purchase," for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by giving value, in law applies to all legal modes of obtaining property, except inheritance of descent. And the word in this peculiar and most technical sense occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, but only in a single passage (if our memory and Mr. Dyce's notes serve us) in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Equal, or greater, is the comparative frequency with which Shakespeare uses other legal phrases; and much wider is the disparity, in this regard, between him and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,—Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster, Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd.

These facts dispose in great measure of the plausible suggestion, which has been made,—that, as the courts of law in Shakespeare's time occupied public attention much more than they do at present, they having then regulated "the season," as the sittings of Parliament (not then frequent or stated) do now,[7 - Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions."] they would naturally be frequented by the restless, inquiring spirits of the time, Shakespeare among them, and that there he and his fellow-dramatists picked up the law-phrases which they wove into their plays and poems. But if this view of the case were the correct one, we should not find that disparity in the use of legal phrases which we have just remarked. Shakespeare's genius would manifest itself in the superior effect with which he used knowledge acquired in this manner; but his genius would not have led him to choose the dry and affected phraseology of the law as the vehicle of his flowing thought, and to use it so much oftener than any other of the numerous dramatists of his time, to all of whom the courts were as open as to him. And the suggestion which we are now considering fails in two other most important respects. For we do not find either that Shakespeare's use of legal phrases increased with his opportunities of frequenting the courts of law, or that the law-phrases, his use of which is most noteworthy and of most importance in the consideration of the question before us, are those which he would have heard oftenest in the course of the ordinary business of the courts in his day. To look at the latter point first,—the law-terms used by Shakespeare are generally not those which he would have heard in ordinary trials at nisi prius or before the King's Bench, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, "fine and recovery," "statutes," "purchase," "indenture," "tenure," "double voucher," "fee simple," "fee farm," "remainder," "reversion," "dower," "forfeiture," etc., etc.; and it is important to remember that suits about the title to real estate are very much rarer in England than they are with us, and in England were very much rarer in Shakespeare's time than they are now. Here we buy and sell houses and lands almost as we trade in corn and cotton; but in England the transfer of the title of a piece of real estate of any consequence is a serious and comparatively rare occurrence, that makes great work for attorneys and conveyancing counsel; and two hundred and fifty years ago the facilities in this respect were very much less than they are now. Shakespeare could hardly have picked up his conveyancer's jargon by hanging round the courts of law; and we find,—to return to the first objection,—that, in his early plays, written just after he arrived in London, he uses this peculiar phraseology just as freely and with as exact a knowledge as he displayed in after years, when (on the supposition in question) he must have become much more familiar with it. Shakespeare's earliest work that has reached us is, doubtless, to be found in "King Henry the Sixth," "The Comedy of Errors," and "Love's Labor's Lost." In the very earliest form of Part II. of the first-named play, ("The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Houses of York and Lancaster," to which Shakespeare was doubtless a contributor, the part of Cade being among his contributions,) we find him making Cade declare, (Act iv. Sc. 7,) "Men shall hold of me in capite; and we charge and command that wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell." Both the phrases that we have Italicized express tenures, and very uncommon tenures of land. In the "Comedy of Errors," when Dromio of Syracuse says, "There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature," [Hear, O Rowland! and give ear, O Phalon!] his master replies, "May he not do it by fine and recovery?" Fine and recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a transfer was made of the title in an entailed estate. In "Love's Labor's Lost," almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare wrote, on Boyet's offering to kiss Maria, (Act ii. Sc. 1,) she declines the salute, and says, "My lips are no common, though several they be." This passage—an important one for his purpose—Lord Campbell has passed by, as he has some others of nearly equal consequence. Maria's allusion is plainly to tenancy in common by several (i.e., divided, distinct) title. (See Coke upon Littleton, Lib. iii. Cap. iv. Sec. 292.) She means, that her lips are several as being two, and (as she says in the next line) as belonging in common to her fortunes and herself,—yet they were no common pasture.

Here, then, is Shakespeare using the technical language of conveyancers in his earliest works, and before he had had much opportunity to haunt the courts of law in London, even could he have made such legal acquirements in those schools. We find, too, that he uses law-terms in general with frequency notably greater—in an excess of three or four to one—than any of the other playwrights of his day, when so many playwrights were or had been Noverints or of the Inns of Court; that this excess is not observable with regard to his use of the vocabulary peculiar to any other occupation or profession, even that of the actor, which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity, and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,—and this is a point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,—that he is amazed "by the accuracy and propriety with which they are introduced," and in another place adds, that Shakespeare "uniformly lays down good law"; and it is not necessary to be a Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench to know that his Lordship is fully justified in assuring us that "there is nothing [of the kind (?)] so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our free-masonry." Remembering, then, that genius, though it reveals general and even particular truths, and facilitates all acquirement, does not impart facts or the knowledge of technical terms, in what manner can we answer or set aside the question that we have partly stated before,—How did it happen, that, in an age when it was a common practice for young attorneys and barristers to leave their profession and take to writing plays and poems, one playwright left upon his works a stronger, clearer, sharper legal stamp than we can detect upon those of any other, and that he used the very peculiar and, to a layman, incomprehensible language of the law of real property, as it then existed, in his very earliest plays, written soon after he, a raw, rustic youth, bred in a retired village, arrived in London? How did it happen that this playwright fell into the use of that technical phraseology, the proper employment of which, more than any other, demands special training, and that he availed himself of it with apparent unconsciousness, not only so much oftener than any of his contemporaries, but with such exact knowledge, that one who has passed a long life in the professional employment of it, speaking as it were officially from the eminent position which he has won,—Lord Campbell,—declares, that,

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he propounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error"?

Must we believe, that the man, who, among all the lawyer-playwrights of his day, showed,—not, be it noticed, (as we are at present regarding his works,) the profoundest knowledge of the great principles of law and equity, although he did that too,—but the most complete mastery of the technical phrases, the jargon, of the law and of its most abstruse branch,—that relating to real estate,—and who used it very much the oftenest of them all, and with an air of as entire unconsciousness as if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes that can be detected by a learned professional critic,—must we believe that this man was distinguished among those play-writing lawyers, not only by his genius, but his lack of particular acquaintance with the law? Or shall we rather believe that the son of the High Bailiff of Stratford, whose father was well-to-do in the world, and who was a somewhat clever lad and ambitious withal, was allowed to commence his studies for a profession for which his cleverness fitted him and by which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to moderate wealth and distinction, and that he continued these studies until his father's loss of property, aided, perhaps, by some of those acts of youthful indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones sometimes will commit, threw him upon his own resources,—and that then, having townsmen, perhaps fellow-students and playfellows, among the actors in London, and having used his pen, as we may be sure he had, for other purposes than engrossing and drawing precedents, he, like so many others of his time, left his trade of Noverint and went up to the metropolis to busy himself with endeavors of art? One of these conclusions is in the face of reason, probability, and fact; the other in accordance with them all.

* * * * *

But of how little real importance is it to establish the bare fact, that Shakespeare was an attorney's clerk before he was an actor! Suppose it proved, beyond a doubt,—what have we learned? Nothing peculiar to Shakespeare; but merely what was equally true of thousands of other young men, his contemporaries, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations. It has a naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal phrases did nothing for him; but he much for them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell upon them, glorifying and enshielding them forever. It would have been the same with the lumber of any other craft; it was the same with that of many others,—the difference being only of quantity, and not of kind. How, then, would the certainty that he had been bred to the law help us to the knowledge of Shakespeare's life, of what he did for himself, thought for himself, how he joyed, how he suffered, what he was? Would it help us to know what the Stratford boys thought of him and felt toward him who was to write "Lear" and "Hamlet," or how the men of London regarded him who was a-writing them? Not a whit. To prove the fact would merely satisfy sheer aimless, fruitless curiosity; and it is a source of some reasonable satisfaction to know that the very people who would be most interested in the perusal of a biography of Shakespeare made up of the relation of such facts are they who have least right to know anything about him. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who giggled through their senseless hour at the "American Cousin,"—a play which, in language, in action, in character, presents no semblance to human life or human creatures, as they are found on any spot under the canopy, and which seems to have been written on the model of the Interlude of "Pyramus and Thisbe," "for, in all the play, there is not one word apt, one player fitted,"—of the people to whom this play owed its monstrous success, and who, for that very reason, it is safe to say, think Shakespeare a bore on the stage and off it, a goodly number would eagerly buy and read a book that told them when he went to bed and what he had for breakfast, and would pay a ready five-cent piece for a picture of him as he appeared in the attorney's office, to preserve as a companion to the equally veritable "portrait of the Hon. Daniel E. Sickles, as he appeared in prison." Nay, it must be confessed, that there are some Shakespearean enthusiasts ever dabbling and gabbling about what they call Shakespeariana, who would give more for the pen with which he engrossed a deed or wrote "Hamlet," than for the ability to understand, better than they do or ever can, what he meant by that mysterious tragedy. Biography has its charms and its uses; but it is not by what we know of their bare external facts that

"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."

What the readers of Shakespeare, who are worthy to know aught of him, long to know, would have been the same, had he been bred lawyer, physician, soldier, or sailor. It is of his real life, not of its mere accidents, that they crave a knowledge; and of that life, it is to be feared, they will remain forever ignorant, unless he himself has written it.

THE MINISTER'S WOOING

[Continued.]

CHAPTER XVI

We suppose the heroine of a novel, among other privileges and immunities, has a prescriptive right to her own private boudoir, where, as a French writer has it, "she appears like a lovely picture in its frame."

Well, our little Mary is not without this luxury, and to its sacred precincts we will give you this morning a ticket of admission. Know, then, that the garret of this gambrel-roofed cottage had a projecting window on the seaward side, which opened into an immensely large old apple-tree, and was a look-out as leafy and secluded as a robin's nest.

Garrets are delicious places in any case, for people of thoughtful, imaginative temperament. Who has not loved a garret in the twilight days of childhood, with its endless stores of quaint, cast-off, suggestive antiquity,—old worm-eaten chests,—rickety chairs,—boxes and casks full of odd comminglings, out of which, with tiny, childish hands, we fished wonderful hoards of fairy treasure? What peep-holes, and hiding-places, and undiscoverable retreats we made to ourselves,—where we sat rejoicing in our security, and bidding defiance to the vague, distant cry which summoned us to school, or to some unsavory every-day task! How deliciously the rain came pattering on the roof over our head, or the red twilight streamed in at the window, while we sat snugly ensconced over the delirious pages of some romance, which careful aunts had packed away at the bottom of all things, to be sure we should never read it! If you have anything, beloved friends, which you wish your Charley or your Susie to be sure and read, pack it mysteriously away at the bottom of a trunk of stimulating rubbish, in the darkest corner of your garret;—in that case, if the book be at all readable, one that by any possible chance can make its way into a young mind, you may be sure that it will not only be read, but remembered to the longest day they have to live.

Mrs. Katy Scudder's garret was not an exception to the general rule. Those quaint little people who touch with so airy a grace all the lights and shadows of great beams, bare rafters, and unplastered walls, had not failed in their work there. Was there not there a grand easy-chair of stamped-leather, minus two of its hinder legs, which had genealogical associations through the Wilcoxes with the Vernons and through the Vernons quite across the water with Old England? and was there not a dusky picture, in an old tarnished frame, of a woman of whose tragic end strange stories were whispered,—one of the sufferers in the time when witches were unceremoniously helped out of the world, instead of being, as now-a-days, helped to make their fortune in it by table-turning?

Yes, there were all these things, and many more which we will not stay to recount, but bring you to the boudoir which Mary has constructed for herself around the dormer-window which looks into the whispering old apple-tree.

The inclosure was formed by blankets and bed-spreads, which, by reason of their antiquity, had been pensioned off to an undisturbed old age in the garret,—not common blankets or bed-spreads, either,—bought, as you buy yours, out of a shop,—spun or woven by machinery, without individuality or history. Every one of these curtains had its story. The one on the right, nearest the window, and already falling into holes, is a Chinese linen, and even now displays unfaded, quaint patterns of sleepy-looking Chinamen, in conical hats, standing on the leaves of most singular herbage, and with hands forever raised in act to strike bells, which never are struck and never will be till the end of time. These, Mrs. Katy Scudder had often instructed Mary, were brought from the Indies by her great-great-grandfather, and were her grandmother's wedding-curtains,—the grandmother who had blue eyes like hers and was just about her height.

The next spread was spun and woven by Mrs. Katy's beloved Aunt Eunice,—a mythical personage, of whom Mary gathered vague accounts that she was disappointed in love, and that this very article was part of a bridal outfit, prepared in vain, against the return of one from sea, who never came back,—and she heard of how she sat wearily and patiently at her work, this poor Aunt Eunice, month after month, starting every time she heard the gate shut, every time she heard the tramp of a horse's hoof, every time she heard the news of a sail in sight,—her color, meanwhile, fading and fading as life and hope bled away at an inward wound,—till at last she found comfort and reunion beyond the veil.

Next to this was a bed-quilt pieced in tiny blocks, none of them bigger than a sixpence, containing, as Mrs. Katy said, pieces of the gowns of all her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and female relatives for years back,—and mated to it was one of the blankets which had served Mrs. Scudder's uncle in his bivouac at Valley Forge, when the American soldiers went on the snows with bleeding feet, and had scarce anything for daily bread except a morning message of patriotism and hope from George Washington.

Such were the memories woven into the tapestry of our little boudoir. Within, fronting the window, stands the large spinning-wheel, one end adorned with a snowy pile of fleecy rolls,—and beside it, a reel and a basket of skeins of yarn,—and open, with its face down on the beam of the wheel, lay always a book, with which the intervals of work were beguiled.

The dusky picture of which we have spoken hung against the rough wall in one place, and in another appeared an old engraved head of one of the Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci, a picture which to Mary had a mysterious interest, from the fact of its having been cast on shore after a furious storm, and found like a waif lying in the sea-weed; and Mrs. Marvyn, who had deciphered the signature, had not ceased exploring till she found for her, in an Encyclopaedia, a life of that wonderful man, whose greatness enlarges our ideas of what is possible to humanity,—and Mary, pondering thereon, felt the Sea-worn picture as a constant vague inspiration.

Here our heroine spun for hours and hours,—with intervals, when, crouched on a low seat in the window, she pored over her book, and then, returning again to her work, thought of what she had read to the lulling burr of the sounding wheel.

By chance a robin had built its nest so that from her retreat she could see the five little blue eggs, whenever the patient brooding mother left them for a moment uncovered. And sometimes, as she sat in dreamy reverie, resting her small, round arms on the window-sill, she fancied that the little feathered watcher gave her familiar nods and winks of a confidential nature,—cocking the small head first to one side and then to the other, to get a better view of her gentle human neighbor.

I dare say it seems to you, reader, that we have travelled, in our story, over a long space of time, because we have talked so much and introduced so many personages and reflections; but, in fact, it is only Wednesday week since James sailed, and the eggs which were brooded when he went are still unhatched in the nest, and the apple-tree has changed only in having now a majority of white blossoms over the pink buds.

This one week has been a critical one to our Mary;—in it, she has made the great discovery, that she loves; and she has made her first step into the gay world; and now she comes back to her retirement to think the whole over by herself. It seems a dream to her, that she who sits there now reeling yarn in her stuff petticoat and white short-gown is the same who took the arm of Colonel Burr amid the blaze of wax-lights and the sweep of silks and rustle of plumes. She wonders dreamily as she remembers the dark, lovely face of the foreign Madame, so brilliant under its powdered hair and flashing gems,—the sweet, foreign accents of the voice,—the tiny, jewelled fan, with its glancing pictures and sparkling tassels, whence exhaled vague and floating perfumes; then she hears again that manly voice, softened to tones so seductive, and sees those fine eyes with the tears in them, and wonders within herself that he could have kissed her hand with such veneration, as if she had been a throned queen.

But here the sound of busy, pattering footsteps is heard on the old, creaking staircase, and soon the bows of Miss Prissy's bonnet part the folds of the boudoir drapery, and her merry, May-day face looks in.

"Well, really, Mary, how do you do, to be sure? You wonder to see me, don't you? but I thought I must just run in, a minute, on my way up to Miss Marvyn's. I promised her at least a half-a-day, though I didn't see how I was to spare it,—for I tell Miss Wilcox I just run and run till it does seem as if my feet would drop off; but I thought I must just step in to say, that I, for my part, do admire the Doctor more than ever, and I was telling your mother we mus'n't mind too much what people say. I 'most made Miss Wilcox angry, standing up for him; but I put it right to her, and says I, 'Miss Wilcox, you know folks must speak what's on their mind,—in particular, ministers must; and you know, Miss Wilcox,' I says, 'that the Doctor is a good man, and lives up to his teaching, if anybody in this world does, and gives away every dollar he can lay hands on to those poor negroes, and works over 'em and teaches 'em as if they were his brothers'; and says I, 'Miss Wilcox, you know I don't spare myself, night nor day, trying to please you and do your work to give satisfaction; but when it comes to my conscience,' says I, 'Miss Wilcox, you know I always must speak out, and if it was the last word I had to say on my dying bed, I'd say that I think the Doctor is right.' Why! what things he told about the slave-ships, and packing those poor creatures so that they couldn't move nor breathe!—why, I declare, every time I turned over and stretched in bed, I thought of it;—and says I, 'Miss Wilcox, I do believe that the judgments of God will come down on us, if something a'n't done, and I shall always stand by the Doctor,' says I;—and, if you'll believe me, just then I turned round and saw the General; and the General, he just haw-hawed right out, and says he, 'Good for you, Miss Prissy! that's real grit,' says he, 'and I like you better for it.'—Laws," added Miss Prissy, reflectively, "I sha'n't lose by it, for Miss Wilcox knows she never can get anybody to do the work for her that I will."

"Do you think," said Mary, "that there are a great many made angry?"

"Why, bless your heart, child, haven't you heard?—Why, there never was such a talk in all Newport. Why, you know Mr. Simeon Brown is gone clear off to Dr. Stiles; and Miss Brown, I was making up her plum-colored satin o' Monday, and you ought to 'a' heard her talk. But, I tell you, I fought her. She used to talk to me," said Miss Prissy, sinking her voice to a mysterious whisper, "'cause I never could come to it to say that I was willin' to be lost, if it was for the glory of God; and she always told me folks could just bring their minds right up to anything they knew they must; and I just got the tables turned on her, for they talked and abused the Doctor till they fairly wore me out, and says I, 'Well, Miss Brown, I'll give in, that you and Mr. Brown do act up to your principles; you certainly act as if you were willing to be damned';—and so do all those folks who will live on the blood and groans of the poor Africans, as the Doctor said; and I should think, by the way Newport people are making their money, that they were all pretty willing to go that way,—though, whether it's for the glory of God, or not, I'm doubting.—But you see, Mary," said Miss Prissy, sinking her voice again to a solemn whisper, "I never was clear on that point; it always did seem to me a dreadful high place to come to, and it didn't seem to be given to me; but I thought, perhaps, if it was necessary, it would be given, you know,—for the Lord always has been so good to me that I've faith to believe that, and so I just say, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want'";—and Miss Prissy hastily whisked a little drop out of her blue eye with her handkerchief.

At this moment, Mrs. Scudder came into the boudoir with a face expressive of some anxiety.

"I suppose Miss Prissy has told you," she said, "the news about the Browns. That'll make a great falling off in the Doctor's salary; and I feel for him, because I know it will come hard to him not to be able to help and do, especially for these poor negroes, just when he will. But then we must put everything on the most economical scale we can, and just try, all of us, to make it up to him. I was speaking to Cousin Zebedee about it, when he was down here, on Monday, and he is all clear;—he has made out free papers for Candace and Cato and Dinah, and they couldn't, one of 'em, be hired to leave him; and he says, from what he's seen already, he has no doubt but they'll do enough more to pay for their wages."

"Well," said Miss Prissy, "I haven't got anybody to care for but myself. I was telling sister Elizabeth, one time, (she's married and got four children,) that I could take a storm a good deal easier than she could, 'cause I hadn't near so many sails to pull down; and now, you just look to me for the Doctor's shirts, 'cause, after this, they shall all come in ready to put on, if I have to sit up till morning. And I hope, Miss Scudder, you can trust me to make them; for if I do say it myself, I a'n't afraid to do fine stitching 'longside of anybody,—and hemstitching ruffles, too; and I haven't shown you yet that French stitch I learned of the nuns;—but you just set your heart at rest about the Doctor's shirts. I always thought," continued Miss Prissy, laughing, "that I should have made a famous hand about getting up that tabernacle in the wilderness, with the blue and the purple and fine-twined linen; it's one of my favorite passages, that is;—different things, you know, are useful to different people."

"Well," said Mrs. Scudder, "I see that it's our call to be a remnant small and despised, but I hope we sha'n't shrink from it. I thought, when I saw all those fashionable people go out Sunday, tossing their heads and looking so scornful, that I hoped grace would be given me to be faithful."