Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/73

Rh put in the report of his conversation with Drummond, her husband described her as somewhat shrewish, but in the more correct and classical sense in which the word was then used, an honest woman, of domestic habits, and courageous in struggling with the poverty and privations of their early married life. Their first child was a daughter, who lived only six months, and whose death called forth from the poet and father these pathetic lines:

In the following year his wife bore him a son, to whom some of the players stood as sponsors, and it is said, Shakespeare among them. This was a year of pinching want and incessant toil. What his necessities at this time, were, we may to some extent judge from a memorandum of Mr. Henslowe, which records "an advance of five shillings" to him; and those who know his works, will remember that he never stooped to any of the small artifices, by which inferior writers gained a contemporary applause to be followed swiftly by an eternal oblivion; that he looked on a poet's mission as something high and holy, and has taught that we should look on poetry as a "sacred invention," and

View her in her glorious ornaments Attired in the majesty of art, Set high in spirit with the precious taste Of sweet philosophy, and, which is most, Crown'd with the rich traditions of a soul,