halted at his name with a "Hail and Farewell!" Let us return to Shakespeare.

The facts of his life, apart from the traditionary stories that have gathered round his name, can be concisely stated, and are probably familiar to the youngest reader.

Shakespeare belonged to the yeoman class. He was born probably on the 23rd of April, 1564, at Stratford-on-Avon, where his father, who was a farmer, had a shop for the sale of gloves as well as of farm produce. John Shakespeare, in his son's early days, was a well-to-do citizen, and enjoyed the honour of being elected chief alderman. There was a free school in the town, to which in all likelihood William was sent. He left it, we may conclude, at an early age, for when the boy was fourteen his father had fallen into pecuniary difficulties, and what he did afterwards, as well indeed as the amount of schooling he received, are mere matters of conjecture. This we do know from the records. of the corporation, that Stratford was frequently visited by companies of players, and it is a safe conclusion that the wonderful boy's genius for the drama was first awakened at these local entertainments. In 1582 the youth, for he was not yet nineteen, married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than her husband. Their first child was born in the following year. The story that Shakespeare, in a youthful freak, stole Sir Thomas Lucy's deer may or may not be true. It is certain that a few years after his marriage he left his birth

place for London. Of the way in which he lived there and of the steps by which he rose to fame we know nothing. Now and then we have slight glimpses of him, and they testify to the sweet nature and large-heartedness of this prince of poets. He found a friend in the young Earl of Southampton, and seems to have early gained a professional reputation, for he acted twice before Queen Elizabeth in 1593. His growth in worldly prosperity was not slow, and at the age of thirty-three he was able to purchase a residence in Stratford. Before that time he lost his only son Hamnet, and learnt thus early, what all of us learn before long, that "the thread of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together." It is evident that throughout his active London life Shakespeare never forgot his birthplace. It was there he would make his home when fortune was propitious; it was there, in the full maturity of his powers, that he was destined to die. One purchase after another of land at Stratford is recorded by the biographers; and in that town, according to a statement recorded in the diary of a Stratford vicar forty years or more after the poet's death, he lived "in his elder days, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1000 a year"-an incredible statement, seeing that money in Shakespeare's time was about ten times the value it is at present. The same diary states: Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank

too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." Let us hope the tradition is a false one.* No English poet has expressed in such forcible language the evils of excess, and one does not like to believe that he was fatally overtaken in a fault of this kind. It is as though the spirit of Stephano had taken possession of Prospero.

There is a contrast worth noting between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. The former is sometimes said to have had a crabbed nature, yet no poet has written more genially of his contemporaries; the disposition of Shakespeare was said to be eminently sweet, yet he has scarcely a line of praise to bestow on his brother poets. In his writings he seems to stand apart from them. That he had a profound consciousness of his own greatness cannot be questioned, for, though it was a habit of every poet who wrote love-sonnets to promise immortal fame to the lady he addressed, Shakespeare's expressions in his "sugared sonnets are too frequent and too emphatic to be treated as mere poetical diction.

"Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
"My love shall in my verse ever live young."
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Words such as these express-can we doubt it?

* Mr. Dyce observes that "we should hardly be justified in determining the cause of Shakespeare's death on the authority of a tradition which was not written down till nearly half a century after the event."

the inmost conviction of the poet's soul; and yet, strange to say-and it is one of the most insoluble problems in literary history-Shakespeare left his great dramas as the ostrich drops her eggs, with an indifference as to their ultimate fate that appears well-nigh incredible. But, indeed, every portion of Shakespeare's career is marvellous. Not that, as some French critics have said, he was a monster in literature, but because his mighty but well-ordered genius was large enough to embrace all human wisdom; because in tragedy and comedy he was alike supreme; because he resembles Nature in her largeness and minuteness, in her sublimity and beauty, in the delicacy and perfection of her colouring, in the grandeur and variety of her forms. The language of hyperbole is scarcely inappropriate when we write of Shakespeare, so impossible is it to do justice to his transcendent powers in the simple speech of common life.

Shakespeare has in recent years become a school classic, like Homer and Virgil. His plays are prepared for school use and for Oxford and Cambridge examinations, so that most young readers gain their earliest acquaintance with the poet through the grammatical study of his words. This is, no doubt, useful labour, and will enable students to read Shakespeare at a later period with intelligence and accuracy. What it cannot do is to impart that sense of poetic art and beauty without which we open in vain the pages of a great poet. Scholarly knowledge is invaluable and forms a solid basis.

on which the student of poetry may build, but he who would enter into the secrets of the art must not rest content with acquisitions that satisfy the examiner. It is something, no doubt, to understand the framework of a drama, but it is more difficult and more essential to enter into the spirit which may be said to make a Shakespearian tragedy or comedy "a being full of life and breath." All poetry worthy of the name is alive; it has in it no element of dissolution; and he is the best student and the wisest critic who can realize most distinctly this poetical vitality. The life of Shakespeare's poetry is, of course, principally exhibited in dramatic representation. There are few characters in history that we know better than his men and women, still fewer that we care for so much; but this life also imparts its energy to passages in which Shakespeare as a descriptive poet tells us what Nature has taught him, or as a lyric poet lifts his song to heaven. But even his descriptive passages and the enchanting music of his songs have a dramatic consistency which does not allow them to be rudely severed from the context. To talk much of Shakespeare's "beauties" is absurd. The real splendour and glory of his work are to be seen in the genius which enables him not merely to write beautiful passages and sweet snatches of song, but to make these passages and these songs subservient to his chief purpose as an artist. They are to be found where they are because they could not be anywhere else.