BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY.
William Shakspeare, the protagonist on the great arena of modern
poetry, and the glory of the human intellect, was born at
Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, in the year 1564,
and upon some day, not precisely ascertained, in the month of
April. It is certain that he was baptized on the 25th; and from
that fact, combined with some shadow of a tradition, Malone has
inferred that he was born on the 23d. There is doubtless, on the
one hand, no absolute necessity deducible from law or custom, as
either operated in those times, which obliges us to adopt such a
conclusion; for children might be baptized, and were baptized, at
various distances from their birth: yet, on the other hand, the 23d
is as likely to have been the day as any other; and more likely
than any earlier day, upon two arguments. First, because there was
probably a tradition floating in the seventeenth century, that
Shakspeare died upon his birthday: now it is beyond a doubt that he
died upon the 23d of April.
Secondly, because it is a reasonable presumption, that no parents,
living in a simple community, tenderly alive to the pieties of
household duty, and in an age still clinging reverentially to the
ceremonial ordinances of religion, would much delay the adoption of
their child into the great family of Christ. Considering the
extreme frailty of an infant’s life during its two earliest years,
to delay would often be to disinherit the child of its Christian
privileges; privileges not the less eloquent to the feelings from
being profoundly mysterious, and, in the English church, forced not
only upon the attention, but even upon the eye of the most
thoughtless. According to the discipline of the English church, the
unbaptized are buried with “maimed rites,” shorn of their
obsequies, and sternly denied that “sweet and solemn farewell,” by
which otherwise the church expresses her final charity with all
men; and not only so, but they are even _locally_ separated
and sequestrated. Ground the most hallowed, and populous with
Christian burials of households.

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