may wonder perhaps that I have not brought it more into notice. But I could not bring it out separately to attention, because it is interfused with the whole of Shakespeare's work. It burns within, it shines around, all that he does; it is at once the central fire and the circumambient lustre of all his creations, the soul and the glory of his genius; it is that by which his humor has so much of depth, and his pathos so much of grandeur ; that which clears passion from the grossness of the blood, whirls it into the infinite of mind, and carries to the sublime of Tragedy.

SHAKESPEARE'S PERSONALITY.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was the third

son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. John Shakespeare, Mr. Collier maintains, was by trade a glover; Mary Arden, his wife, was of the gentry; neither of them could write. They lived in Stratford-upon-Avon; they belonged to the comfortable middle class of the place; and though they appear to have had adversities, they seem never to have lost their order. William, their great son, was baptized on the 26th of April, 1564. His boyhood is a blank to history; and from his baptism to his marriage nothing certain is known of him. There was a free grammar school at Stratford: it was there, we may suppose, that Shakespeare got the elements of his education; so that free grammar school, possibly, rescued Shakespeare from ignorance, and gave him to the world. It has been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time in an attorney's

office.

Stratford, it is said, contained fifteen hundred inhabitants and seven attorneys. Enviable Stratford, that had seven attorneys and one Shakespeare! Extraordinary seven! one of whom had a Shakespeare for his journeyman. Gibbon says that the Emperor Julian escaped narrowly from being a bishop: more fortunately, perhaps, the bishops escaped having a Julian. Shakespeare, it may be, escaped narrowly from being a lawyer. I do not say this invidiously, for Scott, the nearest of all Christian men to Shakespeare, was a lawyer; and, strange as it may seem, the legal profession, notwithstanding all that is said of its dry and rigid technicality, has beyond all other professions produced the greatest number of imaginative writers. But if Shakespeare had ever been in the law, he left it early, and early entered into love. When little more than eighteen, he married Ann Hathaway, who was twenty-five. The marriage was irregular; and six months after it, his daughter Susanna was born. Three years more, twins - Hamnet and Judith -were given to him; and then children came to his house no more. In 1589, in his twenty-sixth year, he is found in London, and connected with a theatre; and much inquiry, and speculation drawn from inquiry, have been expended on this movement. Stratford, it seems,

was a place much given to the drama. Shakespeare, when he was eleven, might have beheld the masks and shows with which Elizabeth was entertained at Kenilworth. Some of his townsmen were on the London stage, and became eminent excellent inducements to lead a dramatic

genius to London. Yet, such is the perverseness of fact against hypothesis, none of these may have been Shakespeare's inducements to go to London : if none of them existed, he might still have gone to London; in going thither, he may have understood nothing of his dramatic genius, nor even have been actuated by a dramatic instinct: what is certain is, that he did go to London; that he connected himself with the theatre, first with the Black Friars', and afterwards, in addition, with the Globe. He had property in both. He published poems, worked at writing plays, and making money. His son died early; he had his daughters married in a quietly prosaic manner, and was a grandfather at forty-five. He came to prosperity, which his parents lived to see, and he entered on a fame which civilized humanity will not survive. He bought houses and lands; he speculated in tithes ; he had lawsuits; and therefore we infer that, like his own Dogberry, he was a man that had losses. When, in the fulness of life, he retired to his native town, he was worth,

according to modern calculation, an income of ten thousand dollars a year. In his native town, on the 23d of April, — about the day of the month on which he was born, he died, in 1616. Thither now the pilgrims gather, to bend over a player's grave; but in that player every generation recognizes, with a more and more loving consent, the poet of humanity. When we consider the sublime genius of him upon whose individual history we can say so little, the brief statement of all that the past can tell us has the grandeur and the mystery of some primeval record.

In these facts, few as they are, added to the one sublime fact of his writings, we yet learn something of Shakespeare. It is evident that he was studious. If, as tradition suggests, his youth was wild and given to adventure, his levities took from him none of the growth which has its vigor in the mind. But such a youth is often combined also with a growth which has its vigor in the senses. It has an exuberance which cannot merge all life into reading and meditation. Nor is the intellect thereby a loser. For when frolics are but the sportiveness of health, they calm the turbulence of the blood; they give transparency to thought; exhilaration quickens as well as clears the brain; activity of sense provides enrichment for fancy; and imagination opens itself