of the name are settled in Vancouver's Island.[366]

Among the list of authors[367] we find the names of Alexander
Shakespear, on the "North-West Provinces of India," 1848; Edward
Shakespear, "A Book of Divinity," 1740; and Sophia Shakespear, 1753, a
biography; Henry Shakespear, "Province of Bengal," 1824, and "Wild
Sports of India," 1860; H. W. Shakespear's "Refutation of Mr. Tryon,"
1847; John Shakespear's Hindustani books; Emily Shakespeare's "Tennyson
Birthday Book," 1877; and Mrs. O. Shakespear, a novel, in 1895. Edward
O. Shakespeare, of Washington, U.S.A., has a medical work on
"Inflammation."

Mr. Russell French, from whose pages I have gleaned the bulk of the
facts concerning these modern Shakespeares, expatiates on the glories of
the later Shakespeare marriages. By the Currie alliance he traces back
descent to the royal Scottish families of the Bruces and the Stewarts;
by the Talbot alliance he traces back their pedigree to Edward I.; by
the Davenport alliance he again connects them with the Ardens, through
Sir Thomas Leighton and the eighth Lord Zouch, who married Joan,
daughter of Sir John Denham, by his wife Joan, daughter and heir of Sir
Richard Archer, who married Joan, the second daughter and coheir of
Giles de Arden, grandson of Sir Robert de Arden, the descendant of
Turchil; but these rather tend to glorify the modern branches than the
poet's name.

It were to be desired that there were more concerted study of registers
and other records concerning the name. Much more might thus be found,
and much of the energy now dissipated in futile searches might be
utilized in connecting the scattered links, because the study of
genealogy is the ancient form of the very modern inquiries into heredity
which interest so many followers of Mr. Francis Galton. It is after all
worth knowing who were the ancestors of William Shakespeare, what
heroic, chivalric, poetic, philosophic strains went to form the nature
of the perfect poet; and it is of mildly sentimental interest to us that
we should know whether any of his line is left on the earth. Of
sentimental interest, I say, for rarely, if ever, does genius repeat
itself, nor do different environing circumstances weld and mould genius
in the same way. Its nature is very easy to kill, or dwarf, or distort,
but it is our excuse for being concerned with those who bear the
honoured name.

In the unsatisfactory inquiries relating to Shakespeare's ancestors I
have exhaust