"High towers, fair temples, goodly theatres, SUCH is Spenser's noble description of what was once the "goodly Verlam." These were The Ruins of Time." But within sixteen miles of Stratford would the young Shakspere gaze in awe and wonder upon ruins more solemn than any produced by "time's decay." The ruins of Evesham were the fearful monuments of a political revolution which William Shakspere himself had not seen; but which, in the boyhood of his father, had shaken the land like an earthquake, and, toppling down its “high steeples,” had made many "An heap of lime and sand, For the screech-owl to build her baleful bower." Such were the ruins he looked upon, cumbering the ground where, forty years before, stood the magnificent abbey whose charters reached back to the days of the Kings of Mercia. The last great building of the Abbey of Evesham is the only one properly belonging to the monastery which has escaped destruction. The campanile which formed an entrance to the conventual cemetery was commenced by Abbot Lichfield in 1533. In 1539 the good abbot resigned the office which he had held for twenty-six years. His successor was placed in authority for a few months, to carry on the farce which was enacting through the kingdom, of a voluntary grant and surrender of all the remaining possessions of the religious houses, which preceded the Act of 1539 "for dissolution of abbeys." Leland, who visited the place within a year or two after the suppression, "rambling to and fro in this nation, and in making researches into the bowels of antiquity.”* says, "In the town is no hospital, or other famous foundation, but the late abbey." The destruction must indeed have been rapid. The house and site of the monastery were granted to Philip Hobby, with a remarkable exception; namely, "all the bells and lead of the church and belfry." The roof of this magnificent fabric thus went first; and in a few years the walls became a stonequarry. Fuller, writing about a century afterwards, says of the abbey, "By a long lease it was in the possession of one Mr. Andrewes, father and son; whose grandchild, living now at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, hath better thriven, by God's blessing on his own industry, than his father and grandfather did with Evesham Abbey; the sale of the stones whereof he imputeth a cause of their ill success.”+ All was swept away. The abbey-church, with its sixteen altars, and its hundred and sixty-four gilded pillars, its chapter-house, its cloisters, its library, refectory, dormitory, buttery, and treasury; its almory, granary, and storehouse; all the various buildings for the service of the church, and for the accommodation of eighty-nine religious inmates and sixty-five servants, were, with a few exceptions, ruins in the time of William Shakspere. Habingdon, who has left a manuscript "Survey of Worcestershire," written about two centuries ago, says, "Let us but guess what this monastery now dissolved was in former days by the gate-house yet remaining; which, though, deformed with age, is as large and stately as any at this time in the kingdom." That gateway has since perished. Of the great mass of the conventual buildings Habingdon states that nothing was left beyond "a huge deal of rubbish overgrown with grass." One beautiful gateway, however, formerly the entrance to the chapter-house, yet remains even to our day. It admits us to a large garden, now let out in small allotments to industrious inhabitants of Evesham. The change is very striking. The independent possession of a few roods of land may perhaps bestow as much comfort upon the labourers of Evesham as their former dependence upon the conventual buttery. But we cannot doubt that, for a long course of years, the sudden and violent dissolution of that great abbey must have produced incalculable poverty and wretchedness. Its princely revenues were seized upon by the heartless despot, to be applied to his unbridled luxury and his absurd wars. The same process of destruction and appropriation was carried on throughout the country. The Church, always a gentle landlord, was succeeded in its possessions by the grasping *Wood, "Athenæ Oxon." "Church History." Dugdale's "Monasticon," ed. 1819, vol. ii., p. 12. creatures of the Crown; the almsgiving of the religious houses was at an end; and then came the age of vagabondage and of poor-laws. The sense which we justly entertain of the advantages of the Reformation has accustomed us to shut our eyes to the tremendous evils which must have been produced by the iniquitous spoliations of the days of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. The religious houses, whatever might have been their abuses, were centres of civilization. Leland says, "There was no town at Evesham before the foundation of the abbey." Wherever there was a well-endowed religious house, there was a large and a regular expenditure, employing the local industry in the way best calculated to promote the happiness of the population. Under this expenditure, not only did handicrafts flourish, but the arts were encouraged in no inconsiderable degree. The commissioners employed to take surrender of the monasteries in Warwickshire reported of the nunnery of Polsworth, "that in this town were then forty-four tenements, and but one plough, the residue of the inhabitants being artificers, who had their livelihood by this house."* In another place Dugdale says, "Nor is it a little observable that, whilst the monasteries stood, there was no act for relief of the poor, so amply did those houses give succour to them that were in want; whereas in the next age, namely 39th of Elizabeth, no less than eleven bills were brought into the House of Commons for that purpose."+ We have little doubt that the judicious encouragement of industry in the immediate neighbourhood of each monastery did a great deal more to render a state provision for the poor unnecessary than the accustomed " succour to those who were in want." The benevolence of the religious houses was systematic and uniform. It was not the ostentatious and improvident almsgiving which would raise up an idle pauper population upon their own lands. The poor, as far as we can judge from the acts of law-makers, did not become a curse to the country, and were not dealt with in the spirit of a detestable severity, until the law-makers had dried up the sources of their profitable industry. Leland, writing immediately after the dissolution of the Abbey of Evesham, says of the town that it is "meetly large and well builded with timber; the market-sted is fair and large; there be divers pretty streets in the town." While the abbey Dugdale's "Warwickshire," p. 800. † Ibid., p. 803. * 66 stood there was an annual disbursement there going forward which has been computed to be equal to eighty thousand pounds of our present money.* The revenues, principally derived from manors and tenements in eight different counties, are seized upon by the Crown. The site of the abbey is sold or granted to a private person, who will derive his immediate advantage by the rapid destruction of a pile of buildings which the piety and opulence of five or six centuries had been rearing. More than a hundred and fifty inmates of this monastery are turned loose upon the world, a few with miserable pensions, but the greater number reduced to absolute indigence. Half the population at least of the town of Evesham must have derived a subsistence from the expenditure of these inmates, and this fountain is now almost wholly dried up. In the youth of William Shakspere it is impossible that Evesham could have been other than a ruined and desolate place. It was the policy of the unscrupulous reformers-who, whatever service they may ultimately have worked in the destruction of superstitious observances, were, as politicians, the most dishonest and rapacious-it was their policy, when (to use their own heartless cant) they had driven away the crows and destroyed their nests, to heap every opprobrium upon the heads of the starving and houseless brethren, of whom it has been computed that fifty thousand were wandering through the land. The young Shakspere was in all probability brought into contact with some of the aged men who had been driven from the peaceful homes of their youth, where they had been brought up in scholastic exercises, and had looked forward to advance in honourable office, each in his little world. Some one of the Gray Friars of Coventry, or the Benedictines of Evesham, must he have encountered, hovering round the scenes of their ancient prosperity; sheltered perhaps in the cottage of some old servant who could labour with his hands, and upon whom the common misfortune therefore had fallen lightly. * "History of Evesham," by George May. A remarkably intelligent local guide. The friars of the future great dramatist would, of necessity, be characters formed either out of his early observation, or moulded according to the general impressions of his early associates. In his mature life the race would be extinct. These his dramatic representations are wonderfully consistent; and it is manifest that he looked upon the persecuted order with pity and with respect. It was for Chaucer to satirize the monastic life in the days of its greatness and abundance. It was for this rare painter of manners to show the grasping dissimulating friar, sitting down upon the churl's bench, and endeavouring to frighten or wheedle the bed-ridden man out of his money : "Thomas, nought of your tressor I desire The ridicule in those times of the Church's pride might be salutary; but other days had come. The most just and tolerant moralist that ever helped to disencumber men of their hatreds and prejudices has consistently endeavoured to represent the monastic character as that of virtue and benevolence. One of Shakspere's earliest plays is "Romeo and Juliet ;" and many of the rhymed portions of that delicious tragedy might have been the desultory compositions of a very young poet, to be hereafter moulded into the dramatic form. Such is the graceful soliloquy which first introduces Friar Lawrence. The kind old man, going forth from his cell in the morning twilight to fill his osier basket with weeds and flowers, and moralizing on the properties of plants which at once yield poison and medicine, has all the truth of individual portraiture. But Friar Lawrence is also the representative of a class. The Infirmarist of a monastic house, who had charge of the sick brethren, was often in the early days of medical science their sole physician. The book-knowledge and the experience of such a valuable member of a conventual body would still allow him to exercise useful functions when thrust into the world; and the young Shakspere may have known some kindly old man, full of axiomatic wisdom, and sufficiently confident in his own management, like the well-meaning Friar Lawrence. In "Much Ado about Nothing," it is the friar who, when Hero is unjustly accused by him who should have been her husband, vindicates her reputation with as much sagacity as charitable zeal : In "Measure for Measure" the whole plot is carried on by the Duke assuming the reverend manners, and professing the active benevolence, of a friar; and his agents and confidants are Friar Thomas and Friar Peter. In an age when the prejudices of the multitude were flattered and stimulated by abuse and ridicule of the ancient ecclesiastical character, Shakspere always exhibits it so as to command respect and affection. 66 The poisoning of King John by a monk, a resolved villain," is despatched by him with little more than an allusion. The Germans believe that Shakspere wrote the old King John in two Parts. The vulgar exaggeration of the |