a
solicitor of Warwick, who drew the important document, but it was not
finally signed and witnessed until the 25th of March, 1616.

William, knowing that his wife would inherit legal dower, one-third of his
real property, and being cared for by her daughter Susannah, only
bequeathed to the "former Anne Hathaway," the personal gift of his "second
best bed."

I asked Shakspere one evening about a month before his death if he intended
the piece of bed furniture for his wife as a rebuke or a compliment.

He replied: "Jack, if you were not so inquisitive you would not have so
much knowledge!"

I thanked him for his lucid explanation, and let the incident go at that
remark.

As he was in a good-natured, facetious mood, I asked him why it was that in
all his dramatic plays of forty years composition he had never placed on
the boards a great Irish character, although he had created Egyptian,
Grecian, Italian, French, German, Danish, Scotch and English
representatives that would go down the ages in eloquent glory.

I said, "William, you only formulated in Henry the Fifth Captain MacMorris,
a Scotch-Irish bastard-renegade character, who bears about as much relation
to a true Irish gentleman as does a shark to a whale, a hawk to an eagle,
or a lynx to a lion."

"Well, Jack, you know as well as I do that the 'eloquent,' 'brave,' 'Irish
rebel,' against monarchy and tyrannical power has been the sharpest thorn
in the sides of English royalty, and that with the enmity of Henry the
Eighth, Queen Elizabeth, King James, and the London Protestants, a great,
lofty Irish Catholic character would not have been popular, and ministered
to our daily desire for pence, shillings and pounds!

"Yet posterity will notice the brave wit and greatness of the Irish race by
their absence from my business plays."

_While writing for the sake of Truth,
From my wild, daring, earliest youth,
You knew I never acted rash
Or failed to fill my purse with cash;_

_For, after all is past and told
Among the foolish, wise and old--
The plot of life is to enfold
Within your grasp, Imperial Gold!_

On the 10th of January, 1616, Judith impulsively married Thomas Quincy,
without the publication of the church banns, to the scandal of the
community, but love cared naught for rules or creeds when Nature stood as
monitor.

Seated one April morning in his private apartment, looking over his
beautiful garden of vegetables, fr