PROFESSOR LOUNSBURY, who reigns sternly but wisely as a critic in the literary demesne where the writer dwells, says that "Shakespeare is the one writer about whom nothing new can be said; that is, nothing rational." Humbly accepting this dictum, though at a loss where a place is to be found for our great critic with his third priceless volume just out, we venture the opinion that some of the things said are not so old but that they are worth saying over again. Is there not, for example, a place for a study of Shakespeare in his habitat? The ground may yield something like grass, — old, but new and welcome in the spring.

It is a mistake to limit the associations of the great citizen to Stratford-uponAvon. He does not belong so much to this dull little village as to all Warwickshire; and if we are to find any relation between the man and his environment, we must take the wider circuit. The question is not as to the walls within which he was born and the grave where his bones lie curse-protected, but rather what helped to make him; what in nature drew out and fed his mighty genius. The photograph can give us with sufficient accuracy the Henley Street birthplace, the parish church, the site of New Place, the Shottery cottage, the grammar school, and all the other local associations; but it cannot give the Avon, that flows through Warwickshire even as it flows through so many of his lines, nor the landscape, more accurately delineated there than in the photograph. Of course, one must carry out the immemorial custom of tourists, and visit the birthplace and the grave, -the two things pertaining to any man, great or small, least worth heeding, but either before or after, one should acquaint one's self with the surrounding country.

The ancient town of Warwick, with its castle full of suggestion of Crusader and Templar, and Kenilworth, about which still clung the memory of Elizabeth's visit,—both within a short drive or a long ramble from Stratford, cast a stronger influence upon the young Shakespeare than did the town where he was born. It was at Warwick that he saw those strolling players who first kindled the dramatic fire within him, and perhaps inducted him in practical ways into their craft. Eight miles was a short distance for a band of players to attract the young Shakespeare; cart-ropes could not have kept him away. Kenilworth, still ablaze with courtly glory, taught him how queens and dukes and knights bore themselves, at a future day the pageants of the Henrys would move easily across the stage. Shakespeare learned a vast deal before he went to London; but his lesson-book was all Warwickshire and not the leaf or two of Stratford.

It is significant that Shakespeare came from this shire, which is often spoken of as "the heart of England." Indeed, I think if he had come from any other, he would have been a different and a poorer Shakespeare. With all his universality he was distinctly and intensely an Englishman, but English in the sense of having the English heart rather than the English brain. His intellect cannot easily be classified, — it comes too near being absolute and without limitations; but his loves and hates and tastes were English to the core. This heart of England, out of which Shakespeare drew his being, is sharply located. As you drive from Leamington to Warwick, your carriage is halted before an oak in the middle of the road, surrounded by an iron fence. The driver reverently rises,

points to the tree, and says, "That hoak is the 'art of Hengland.

The heart of England is poetically supposed to be of oak; and yet your driver is not speaking in a figure, but with geographical accuracy. Draw lines from the Isle of Wight to Tweedmouth; from Yarmouth on the east to St. David's on the west; from Penzance to Newcastle, and from Hastings to Carlisle, and they would almost if not absolutely intersect this truly royal oak.

When we return to Stratford, and begin the tourists' round, we are pained to find ourselves beset by uncertainty. Not one of the associations with Shakespeare is wholly trustworthy. There are but two points of close unquestioned association, the house in which he was born and the church in which he was buried. All else, except a bit of ruined wall, marking New Place, is guesswork. Doubtless he walked these streets, roamed through these fields, swam in the gently flowing Avon, and later—in those mysterious years of his retirement-mingled in the life of the little town; but no sure trace of word or work remains. By far the most interesting association with the poet-because the most poetical—is the garden about the little house where he was born, - a small, well-kept plot of gravel-walks and flowerbeds. When this house was restored, it was proposed to bring together all the flowers named in the dramas. The plan was not carried out, chiefly from lack of energy, for surely it would not have been a difficult task. But enough was done to make the collection interesting and significant. Few and simple as the specimens are, they can be woven into a telling argument for the Shakespearean authorship of the plays, or, at least, for their origin in Central England. An accomplished botanist in Leamington told us that the flowers of Shakespeare are distinctively the flowers of Warwickshire, and that the author of the plays must have observed them here and not elsewhere. It is a remarkable fact that the slight local variations in the

flowers of England are to be traced in the lines of Shakespeare. The true poet is a closer observer than the naturalist.

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It is impossible wholly to verify any except the most meagre statement of his external history, so that a Life is not to be named, however many have been attempted. But such as they are, perhaps Aubrey's is the best, being the shortest, containing only about six hundred and twenty words. As he wrote well within a century after the poet's death, he had little reason for inaccuracy, and less temptation to exaggerate in his estimates, relying chiefly upon Ben Jonson and first-hand traditions. Great as Shakespeare was, he had not sufficiently impressed his age with his genius to start exaggerations as to his personal character; and as for myths, they are of slow growth. Aubrey's few words, simple and disconnected to the last degree, but all the truer for that, contain one sentence that strikes at the secret of Shakespeare, and is as profound as anything ever said of him: "His comœdies will remaine witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombeities, that twenty yeares hence they will not be understood."

We can, however, construct a life, not of gossip indeed, but of reality made from actual records. We do not refer to those inferences, drawn from various sources, that Shakespeare was a school-teacher, a lawyer's clerk, a physician's apprentice, a soldier, and so on. We refer instead to that impress of himself which he made in his works, and which can be read, or rather translated, by the careful student. Take, for example, his treatment of flowers. They all have literally the dew of youth upon them. They were not an object of study; they are treated simply in the light of memory and early association. "Rosemary, that's for remembrance;" "pansies, that's for thoughts;" "Rue, we may call it herb-grace o' Sundays," - - that is, rue, which stands

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for sorrow, may on Sunday be called an herb of grace, for the day can turn sorrow into that quality. What a flavor there is here of country-life and child-life, - of those things which get fixed in a child's mind and are never forgotten.

While Shakespeare's treatment of flowers is essentially that of a poet, there is underneath this use that peculiar sense of them which belongs to childhood, as it interprets popular conceptions. Many times over he tells us by what names flowers are known to different persons, evidently the result of memories of childhood. Memory is par excellence the poet's faculty. To see a thing as it was, and to see it in the light and with the feelings of memory, this is what makes poetry possible, -a profound impression, cherished and meditated.

Shakespeare's descriptions of flowers have this quality of remembered association, and they call out the purest exercise of his genius. It is on his two loveliest characters, Ophelia and Perdita, that this wealth of flowers is lavished without stint; in The Winter's Tale, where love passionate yet pure is woven into each flower, Perdita in disguise gives them to her visitors; and in Hamlet, when Ophelia says "You must wear your rue with a difference," yet all "she turns to favor and to prettiness. Nowhere does Shakespeare show the tenderness and keenness of his genius more than in this use of the same common flowers in connection with the tragedy of love brought to despair, and of love in the very height and enchantment of its near-at-hand revelation.

All this tallies with the alleged facts of his life as spent first in Warwickshire, and then in London, where most of his plays were written, and last in Stratford, where the memories of his youth were revived after wide separation from its scenes. There are three conditions essential to a true vision of natural scenery: that one must spend one's childhood in the presence of it, must leave it, and later on return to it. The close and divine contact of the first period, the memories of

When the pilgrim has fully mastered the few details of Shakespeare's birthplace, he proceeds directly to the church, putting but a ten-minutes walk between the cradle and the grave of the poet, a symbol of how little there is to be known between. The grammar school, the Shottery cottage, Charlecote Park, and the few stones of New Place, are all the material with which to fill the long gap.

Let us not hastily infer, however, that nothing more is to be told of him. Aubrey evidently does not give all he knows or could get at, but only a few salient points and incidents. Along with these reasonably sure facts are a number of hints which may be built up into facts by aid drawn from the writings. It is these hints that reveal the man.

If there is one thing more clear than another it is that Shakespeare was preeminently a man of business and regarded himself as such. His relation to his work seems to have been a violation of all the canons which are supposed to govern poets. There is no trace of literary ambition in connection with his plays; whatever ambition of this sort he may have entertained had to do with two or three poems. Upon his plays he seems to have set no estimate beyond their commercial value. There is about him an almost total absence of the literary atmosphere, and in its place we have the hard-headed, common-sense man of business. We grant the fullness of the poetic gift, the largest with which mortal man was ever dowered. We do not doubt that there was a constant play of the poetic faculty; there was doubtless the dreaminess, the spiritual eye, the responsiveness of the poet to every kind of inspiration; but it was, so to speak, subconscious. He presents himself to us chiefly in the light of a man who is determined to get on in the world by means of business and in business-like ways; he has no other controlling ambi

tion; he uses his great powers simply and solely to advance his fortunes. There are several men to be regarded, each one of which he was, both consciously and of set purpose, before we come to Shakespeare the literary man. There is the man of affairs, the actor and manager, the country gentleman, the family man, and the man of society. This should not lower him in our respect. Almost any departure from the rôle of the literary men of his day, as played by Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, would reflect credit upon him. That he withheld himself from the excessive Bohemianism of his contemporaries shows good sense and sound character. That his ambition took the form of advancing his fortunes has several grounds of justification. He thus simply shows himself genuinely English. To be the author of a popular novel or of a poem that sells, or to be a party leader, is all very well; but when you have discovered what a true Englishman likes above all else, you will find it to be seven hunters and a pack of hounds.

Shakespeare evidently shared in this English liking to the full, and added to it all the fervor of a poet's heart. The literary men of his day, and for two centuries after, were Londoners. Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb were types of English literary men up to the beginning of the 19th century, loving London and hating the country, men of clubs and taverns and garrets. Shakespeare seemed not to belong to this set, though Aubrey says that he was 'very good company and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt;" and also says, "He was wont to goe to his native country once a yeare;" which indicates that Shakespeare regarded himself as a citizen of Stratford, and at last remained there altogether. His taste and ambition were gratified in Warwickshire rather than in London.

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There is much reason to believe that his interest in business was due not only to natural taste, but to stern determination as well. This much is plain: after a stormy youth that seems to have reached

its height in lawlessness, and after an early marriage, he abruptly leaves the country and speedily turns up in London, first in some subordinate position in a theatre, then as an actor, then as a shareholder - and probably a manager

in the Globe and Blackfriars, an author of carefully written poems, a most earnest student of the Italian and French drama, and very soon a writer of original plays, which he produces with great rapidity. Now here is a great revolution. We think it was a moral revolution, of which there was abundant occasion. But probably the main spur and the one that gave him a special direction toward moneymaking, was the condition of his father's affairs. It is quite clear that his life, from his schooldays on, was a struggle, not so much with poverty, as with business troubles. It is strange that we know more of the father than of the son, but in knowing the former we infer the latter. John Shakespeare followed as many occupations as have been ascribed to his son William, hence the probable explanation of the latter's wide knowledge of several branches of business. It was not the son but the father who figured in so many callings. He was a glover, a farmer, a butcher, a wool-stapler, a lumber-merchant, a corn-dealer, ale-taster, burgess, constable, chamberlain, alderman, high bailiff, and mayor, and had figured in each calling and office before his son went to London. As the boy had early left the grammar school in order to serve his father, he undoubtedly shared his life and knew all

that was to be thus learned. But what proved the boy's education - and for such a boy none could have been better - became the father's ruin. Certainly, as the son was attaining manhood, we find John Shakespeare heavily involved in debt, his wife's property mortgaged, and himself either in the debtor's jail or in hiding to escape it. How this state of affairs came about is unknown, but it may have been the natural conclusion of a career embracing so many occupations, followed at first with a success that led to

One of the most self-revealing of the Plays is As You Like It. We cannot but feel that in Jaques there is a touch of personal experience, and that as he views the "careless herd, full of pasture" jump past the wounded deer, and “never stay to greet him," the author has in mind the vicissitudes of his father's career.

Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens; "T is just the fashion: wherefore do you look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?

The place the Forest of Arden, just north of Stratford, and his mother's birthplace; the character-a bankrupt slighted by his prosperous fellow citizens make it almost certain that the passage is a bit of family history. The father had lost his position as alderman on account of his embarrassments, and not improbably the son shared in his ostracism, even if he may not have caused it.

It is common to ascribe Shakespeare's fullness and accuracy in narrative to observation; but the eye, however wide open and keen, does not see all things. Without the touch of experience, all things would pass before it as an unsubstantial vision. Whenever there is unusual depth of meaning, or intensity of feeling, or a prevailing thought in different plays, it is safe to infer that we are listening to a note struck from personal experience. The soliloquy of Hamlet runs close to the autobiographic:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con

tumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes

This is not observation of life; it is the experience, the very distillation of it. The Warwickshire note is heard again in his dealing with courts of justice. Law itself is treated in a lofty way, in the spirit of broadest wisdom, and even religiously; but its administration with bitter complaint, contempt and ridicule. Shakespeare was much too sensible a man to sprinkle his påges with contempt of the courts without good reason for it. We can read between the lines a stern conviction that the administration of law, if not the law itself, was devoid of mercy, and that it bore heavily upon his father; also that in his own case and as administered by country justices, it was a farce. However this be, he gave the keynote to all future treatment of legal proceedings; whatever abuse there may be, there is some stinging phrase with which to pierce it.

It is upon the background of such a life as this a stormy youth involved in the meshes of the law; a considerable training in business which has come to literal grief and perhaps shame; his father a ized; a young family dependent upon bankrupt; his mother's property jeopardhim for support; a man but twenty-two twice these years years old, though with the experience of with such a life behind him and weighing down upon him, he goes to London, renews acquaintance with actors whom he had met in War

wickshire, and at once enters upon his great career.

One can safely venture assertions in regard to Shakespeare, because if judiciously made no one can prove them false; we mean any assertion except that he did not write the plays. Hence we do not hesitate to assert that on going to London he underwent a revolution. He had, very likely, been a spendthrift; he had left a wife and children in poverty, a father in business difficulties possibly caused by himself, and the estate of his mother endangered. These facts are sufficient to account for the direction he now took; in