Lucy, Esquire." Thirty-five inhabitants of Stratford, chiefly
tradespeople, are named in the list, but no Shakespeares among them.

Knight, over-zealous in the Poet's behalf, will not allow any thing to
be true that infers the least moral blemish in his life: he therefore
utterly discredits the story in question, and hunts it down with
arguments more ingenious than sound. In writing biography,
special-pleading is not good; and I would fain avoid trying to make
the Poet out any better than he was. Little as we know about him, it
is evident enough that he had his frailties, and ran into divers
faults, both as a poet and as a man. And when we hear him confessing,
as in a passage already quoted, "Most true it is, that I have looked
on truth askance and strangely"; we may be sure he was but too
conscious of things that needed to be forgiven; and that he was as far
as any one from wishing his faults to pass for virtues. Deer-stealing,
however, was then a kind of fashionable sport, and whatever might be
its legal character, it was not morally regarded as involving any
criminality or disgrace. So that the whole thing may be justly treated
as a mere youthful frolic, wherein there might indeed be some
indiscretion, and a deal of vexation to the person robbed, but no
stain on the party engaged in it.

The precise time of the Poet's leaving Stratford is not known; but we
cannot well set it down as later than 1586. His children, Hamnet and
Judith, were born, as I have said, in the early part of 1585; and for
several years before that time his father's affairs were drooping. The
prosecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy, added to his father's straitness of
means, may well have made him desirous of quitting Stratford; while
the meeting of inclination and opportunity in his acquaintance with
the players may have determined him where to go, and what to do. The