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tony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse — allusion — is of such weight—has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson; not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship.

If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James—names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best

I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.

And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pil

grimage which he told us of in such winning num bers, make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the "Faerie Queene," they are phantasmic; we may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely -they have no flesh and blood texture and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the bestdrawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because "A New Way to Pay Old Debts" has always a certain relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well - Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters appear, but because none of them have that vital

roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities.

We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us—maybe their pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know.

Shakespeare's Youth.

And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where

did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue?

And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men-poets and dramatists who belonged to his time, and who—with a pleasant egoism-let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family "wash." Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless-aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted-to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him; he ran out of sight of them all.

He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born — his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timberand-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers—whether in wool, meats, or gloves-and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher's fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family—in the female line*— toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the

*The allusion is to the Harts, whose ancestress was Shakespeare's sister Joan. A monumental record in Trinity Church, Stratford, reads thus: "In memory of Thomas Hart, who was the fifth descendant in a direct line from Joan, eldest daughter of John Shakespeare. He died May 23, 1793."

A son of the above Thomas Hart "followed the business of a butcher at Stratford, where he was living in 1794.” Still another Thomas Hart (eighth in descent from Joan) is said to be now living in Australia-the only male representive of that branch of the family.