he drops it almost instantly again, and returns once more to reality.

And for this reason, and apparently for this reason alone, Shakespeare has been dubbed a pagan, and charged with a hard materialism. But this surely is unfair to Shakespeare. Because a man keeps silence on any given subject, he is not necessarily unmindful of or indifferent to it. Nay, he may feel the more, and hesitate to commit himself to, or handle mysteries beyond his powers of apprehension and explanation. As Professor Dowden very truly observes :

"The infinite of meditation, and the infinite of passion, both these lay within the range of Shakespeare's experience and Shakespeare's art. He does not indeed come forward with an explanation of the mysteries of existence, perhaps because he felt more than other men their mysteriousness."

Shakespeare, of course, had his limitations; he was human like the rest of us, but within his limitations no greater than he has arisen, or perhaps is ever likely to arise.

"The voyaging spirit of man cannot remain within. the enclosure of any one age or any single mind. We need to supplement the noble positivism of Shakespeare with an element not easy to describe or define, but none the less actual, which the present century has demanded as essential to its spiritual life and well-being."

And it is possible that under other conditions with a new outlook, and with the advance and growth of the human mind, a greater even than Shakespeare may appear to voice and illustrate the life of a distant, and it may be, more exalted humanity.

The lessons to be derived from Shakespeare, both direct and indirect, are many and varied, but the sum of the whole has never been more felicitously or truth

fully summed up than by Mr Walter Bagehot in the following passage:

"If this world is not all evil, he who has understood and painted it best, must probably have some good. If the almighty and underlying essence of the world be good, then it is likely that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence, will be himself good. There is a religion of week-days, as well as of Sundays, a religion of cakes and ale,' as well as of pews and altar cloths. This England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedge-rows, and its many trees, and its great towns and its endless hamlets, and its motley society and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its gathering power; and he saw that they were good. To him perhaps more than to any one else has it been given to see, that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principle of its noble vigour, to the essence of character . . . we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made. Let us think of him, not as a teacher of dry dogmas or a sayer of hard sayings, but as

"A priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world

A teacher of the hearts of men and women.'

As regards the arrangement of the following pages the author claims for them a certain sequence and chronological order, though he is painfully aware that there is a lack of proportion and unity in the whole. To present a book to the public perfect in this respect, would be an arduous task, beyond his powers of adaptability and condensation, unless the book were drawn out to an inordinate length.

The method adopted is as follows. The first chapters are devoted to the little we know of Shakespeare the

man, and the nature and character of his age and his position in it. Those following immediately are largely occupied with a discussion of Hamlet, Shakespeare's greatest tragic, and Henry V., his greatest historic character. They both of them loom so large and are so attractive to all, that some reference to them was to the author, at any rate, irresistible, though they are rather thrust in and out of place and somewhat break in on the general arrangement.

Shakespeare's humour, wit, and satire are next discussed and illustrated from the plays of Henry IV., Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, and Midsummer Night's Dream, quoted and criticised at considerable though not inordinate length; as perhaps none of Shakespeare's plays illustrate and illuminate with greater brilliancy the lighter and more captivating side of his art. Certain selections are then taken from a variety of plays, and the volume concludes with some observations on King Lear, possibly the last great tragic outburst of the genius of Shakespeare.

It is like a loud and prolonged thunder-clap which winds up the storm and tempest of his mind. In Cymbeline, and The Tempest, which in point of time are considered the last of Shakespeare's plays, we are in subsiding and calmer waters. They are remarkable and beautiful plays in their way, and reveal a spirit of gentleness, reconciliation, and forgiveness, qualities which are somewhat foreign to the writings of Shakespeare's fuller maturity and power. They are the expiring efforts of a great genius, already entering on its decline.

Having said so much by way of preface, if the gentle reader will now take the author by the hand he will introduce him at once to the man, William Shakespeare, himself.

CHAPTER II

THE MAN SHAKESPEARE

WHAT do we know of the man Shakespeare, the eldest son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, his wife, born at Stratford-on-Avon, 23rd April 1564?

Many people imagine, apart from what he wrote, that Shakespeare may be regarded almost as a mythical personage, but this idea is mistaken, and contrary to the facts as we know them.

It is true, that of his comings in and goings out, of his daily habits, of his intercourse with his fellows, of his personal appearance, and so forth, our information is but scanty and meagre.

But our knowledge about the man as distinguished from his personality, and apart from any inference that may be drawn from his writings, is, perhaps, larger and more intimate than many people imagine. Until his nineteenth year our knowledge of him is traditional, and founded purely on conjecture.

Shakespeare probably received his early education at the free Grammar School of Stratford: but we are ignorant of when he went to school, and when he left it.

It has been asserted that in his early days he was a schoolmaster in the county; and again that he was employed in the office of an attorney, and both suggestions are sufficiently possible and plausible. Indications of some legal training are to be found

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in his plays, and many of his law terms and allusions. are applied with much technical exactness and propriety. But this of itself hardly warrants the assertion that Shakespeare was ever an Attorney's clerk; at the best it is but a surmise, for Shakespeare was a many-sided genius, he was a practical man of affairs, as well as a great actor, playwright, and dramatic poet.

He was one of a great company of celebrated literary men. He lived, moreover, many years in London, and would naturally possess some acquaintance of the technical phraseology of all arts and professions.

The position he held as playwright and stage manager would have brought him into contact with many business transactions affecting his profession— and what more likely than that he should pick up some technical legal terms?—or they may even have been supplied to him by some lawyer of his acquaintance. Certainly he was possessed of a considerable stock of legal phraseology. For instance he makes Hamlet say in the churchyard scene-:

"Ham. There's another; why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt. Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures ? "

Once admit that because a man is a master of a few technical terms, he must therefore be a member of the profession to which those terms apply, and you can prove Shakespeare to have been a tinker, tailor, ploughboy, or sailor, or anything you will.

In his nineteenth year we have some reliable