Page:A life of William Shakespeare (IA lifeofwilliamsha02lees).pdf/14

preface to a fuller account of these fruits of recent research. None of the 'new' references to Shakespeare are of the first importance. But every early documentary mention of Shakespeare justly claims the biographical student's respectful attention.

I place these new notices before my readers in the chronological order which they naturally take among the previously recorded events of Shakespeare's life.^[1]

Although heredity, as far as the results of present investigation go, fails to account for the birth of supreme poetic genius, the biographer of Shakespeare has often deplored the absence of any reference to the personal character of Shakespeare's father. A glimmer of light has now been shed on this theme. The Rev. Andrew Clark, rector of Great Leighs, Chelmsford, who has won a deserved reputation by his researches into the history of Oxford University, examined some five years since a seventeenth-century collection of books and papers which were bequeathed to the town of Maldon, in Essex, by a patriotic native, Thomas Plume. The testator was for nearly fifty years Vicar of Greenwich, and was also Archdeacon of Rochester. He is now only remembered as founder