and work for the best. For himself, he sees a germ of good in things that look all evil to the careless eye-his eyes being large with love. If there is only the least little redeeming touch he is sure to point it out. If there be only one word to be said for some abandoned nature he pleads it, to arrest the harsh judgment and awake the kindly thought. If there be only one solitary spark of virture in some dark heart, what a sigh of gentle pity he breathes over it, trying to kindle it into clearer life. He has infinite pity for the suffering and struggling and wounded by the way. He takes to his warm heart much that the world has cast out to perish in the cold. There is nothing too poor or mean to be embraced within the circle of his sympathies. One of his characters says, "I am one of those gentle ones that will use the devil himself with courtesy' (Twelfth Night, IV. ii.). And of such was the Gentle Shakspeare.

Then what an all-embracing charity! what an all-including kindliness he shows toward many things that are apt to put us out! He never flies into a passion with stupidity. He divines how Conservative a makeweight it is in this world; knows that it gets largely represented in Parliament; is the father of a good many families, and altogether too respectable a thing to be ignored. He shows how a fool like Cloten in the play of Cymbeline may be a person of consequence and consideration in the Council of State. The humours of the obtusely ignorant, the unfathomably conceited, the hopelessly dull, were for the first time adequately translated out of dumb nature into our English tongue by him. And the revelations thus made at times are as if the animals were suddenly endowed with human speech. They grow garrulous with the wine of his wit. How he listens to the simplicities or pretentious pomp of ignorance! Pearls might be dropping from its lips! He does not say, "Let no dog bark or donkey bray in my presence!" On the contrary, he likes to hear what they have to say for themselves, and delights in drawing them out for a portrait fulllength! He seems to smile and say, "If God can put up with all these fools and ignoramuses, why should I fume and fret and denounce them? No doubt they serve some great purposes in His scheme of creation. I shall put them into mine." And no botanist ever culled his simples with more loving care than Shakspeare his samples of what we might pharisaically call the God-help-them sort or species of human beings; or God's own unaccountables. It is as though he thought Nature had her precious secret hidden here as elsewhere, and with sufficient patience we should find it all out, if we only watched and waited. See the generous encouragement he gives to Dogberry! How he draws him out, and makes much of him. You would say he was "enamoured of an ass." But perhaps the glory of all his large toleration shines out in his treatment of that "sweet bully" Bottom. Observe how he heaps the choicest gifts and showers the rarest freaks of Fortune around that ass's head. All the wonders of fairy-land are revealed, all that is most exquisitely dainty and sweet in poetry is scattered about his feet. Airy spirits of the most delicate loveliness are his ministers. The Queen of Fairy is in love with him. He is told how beautiful he is in person, how angelic is his voice. And Bottom accepts it all with the most sublime stolidity of conceit. There is a self-possession of ignorance that Shakspeare himself could not upset, although he seems to delight in seeing how far it can go. Nick Bottom has no start of surprise, no misgiving of sensitiveness, no gush of gratitude, no burst of praise. He is as calm in his Ass-head as Jove in his Godhead. Shakspeare knew how often blind Fortune

will play the part of Titania, and lavish all her treasures and graces on some poor conceited fool, some Lord Rich, and feed him with the honey-bag of the bee, and fan him with the wings of butterflies, and light him to bed with glowworm lamps, and the Ass will still be true to his nature, and require his “peck of provender."

Instead of fretting and fuming at folly, or arguing with pig-headedness, and losing his temper, he laughed and showed them how they looked in the magic mirror of his mirth. One often thinks with a longing sigh of that beatitude of Shakspeare's in the domain of his humour, and the great delight he must have had in being a Showman.

As all intelligent actors will testify, the Plays were written and managed by an actor. It was an essential condition for the production of Shakspeare-a feat that Nature herself in conjunction with Art could only perform once-that the supreme dramatist should also be a born actor, a working actor, and have a theatre all to himself for the mould of his mind, for the trying on of his work, and the fitting out of his characters. In this unique combination it was of the first necessity that the playwright should be the Player as well as the great Poet.

He shows no scorn for actors in his plays. His disgust for bad acting proves his relish for the good. No critic has ever bettered his criticism in Hamlet. He bespeaks kindly treatment for his fellows in the Taming of the Shrew, when the Lord commands a servant to take them to the buttery—

"And give them friendly welcome every one,

Let them want nothing that my house affords."

Nor does he overlook them in his will. And when all is said, the one character adequate to express the Man Shakspeare at work is that of the Showman. He held up the mirror to Nature as the showman of the world. It is as showman for the human race that he takes them all off with his impartial representations and gives them all a show.

Goethe has said that Shakspeare's characters are mere incarnate Englishmen. But how should they be only that when he was the incarnation of all humanity? Are we to say that his women are mere Britishers? It is true the national spirit was most Englishly embodied in his works, but he himself cannot be considered insular. He bids us remember that there are "livers out of England"! We know, of course, where his nationality lies. He was a dear lover of this dear land of ours. He loved her homely face, and took to his heart her "tight little form, that is so embraceable! He loved her tender glory of green grass, her gray skies, her miles on miles of rosy apple-bloom in spring-time, her valleys brimful of the rich harvest gold in autumn; her leafy lanes and field-paths, and lazy, loitering river-reaches;, her hamlets nestling in the quiet heart of rural life; her scarred old Gothic towers and mellow red-bricked chimneys with their Tudor twist, and white cottages peeping through the jasmine and roses. We know how he loved his own native woods and wild flowers, the daisy, the primrose, the wild honeysuckle, the cowslip, and most of all, the violet. This was his darling of our field flowers. And most lovingly has he distilled or expressed the spirit of the violet into one of his sweetest women, and called her Viola! His favourite birds also are the common homely English singing birds, the lark and nightingale, the cuckoo and blackbird that sang to him in his childhood and still

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sing to-day in the pleasant woods of Warwickshire. He loved all that we call and prize as so English." He loved the heroes whom he saw round him in every-day life, the hardy, bronzed mariners that went sailing "Westward Ho." Indeed, the mention of England's name offers one of our best opportunities for a personal recognition; when an English thought has struck him, how he brands the "mark of the lion" on his lines! We may see also in his early plays what were his personal relations to the England of that memorable time which helped to mould him: see how the war stirred his nature to its roots, and made them clasp England with all their fibres: we may see how he fought the Spaniard in feeling, and helped to shatter their "invincible" armadas. We learn how these things made him turn to teach his country's history, portray its past, and exalt its heroes in the eyes of all the world. How often does he show the curse of civil strife, and read the lesson that England is safe so long as she is united. Thus he lets us know how true an Englishman he was.

There are times when he quite overruns the speech of a character with the fulness of his own English feeling. In one or two instances this is very striking; for example, in that speech of old Gaunt's in Richard II., at the name of England the writer is off, and cannot stop. His own blood leaps along the shrunken veins of grave and aged Gaunt; Shakspeare's own heart throbs through the whole speech; the dramatic mask grows transparent with the light of his own kindled countenance, and you know it is Shakspeare's own face behind; his own voice that is speaking; a fact that he had forgotten for the moment, because Nature was at times too strong for his art. Again, we have but to read the speech of King Harry V., on the night, or rather the dawn, of Agincourt, to feel how keen was the thrill of Shakspeare's patriotism. Harry was a hero after our Poet's own English heart, and he takes great delight in such a character. His thoughts grow proud and jolly; his eyes fill, his soul overflows, and there is a riot of life which takes a large number of lines to quell! That "little touch of Harry in the night" gives us a flash of Shakspeare in the light.

Shakspeare's starting-point for his victorious career had been the vantageground that England won when she had broken the strength of the Spaniard, and sat enthroned in her sea-sovereignty, breathing an ampler air of liberty, glowing with the sense of a lustier life, and glad in the great dawn of a future new and limitless. He had an eye very keenly alive to the least movement of the national life. When the fresh map of England is published he takes immediate note of it. Maria, in Twelfth Night, says, "He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies." And when the two crowns of England and Scotland are united in the person of James, Shakspeare alters the old doggerel,

into

"Fi, fo! fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman,"

"I smell the blood of a British man.

for which the Scotch take him closer to heart, and give him a hug of additional delight.

The tradition is that Shakspeare in person was a handsome, well-made man, and that the parts he played were those demanding dignity of presence and nobility of bearing. Such a man is roug ly rendered by the Droeshout etching

and the Stratford bust. These two are sufficient for us to re-create our Shakspeare as a man of sturdy build, with large lineaments; with a coronal region to his head as royal as the intellectual. The hair of a warm brown, and the beard somewhat more golden; a man, not made out of cheese parings and heeltaps, but full of ripe life and cordial spirits and concentrated energy; with eyes to be felt by those on whom they looked; such eyes as see most things without the head turning about; a full mouth, frank and brave, and richly humorous, capable of giving free utterance to the laugh that would ring out of the manly chest with all his heart in it. Mr. Dyce observed that the bust exhibits the Poet in the act of composition, and enjoying, as it were, the richness of his own conceptions. A happy remark in illustration of Shakspeare's smile was likewise made by R. B. Haydon the painter, in a note of his written June 13th, 1828, in the album kept at Stratford Church. Speaking of the bust, he says, "The forehead is fine as Raphael's or Bacon's, and the form of the nose and exquisite refinement of the mouth, with its amiable, genial hilarity of wit and good-nature, so characteristic, unideal, bearing truth in every curve, with a little bit of the teeth showing at the moment of smiling, which must have been often seen by those who had the happiness to know Shakspeare, and must have been pointed out to the sculptor as necessary to likeness when he was dead." 1

These outward presentments of the man are a sufficient warrant for what we feel in communing with the spirit of his works. In these we apprehend him as having been essentially a cheerful man, full to overflowing with healthy gladness. This is manifest from the first, in his poems written at an age when most youngsters are wanton with sadness. There is no sadness in his first song; he sustains a merry note lustily; the Venus and Adonis, the Lover's Complaint, are brimful of health; they bespeak the ruddy English heart, the sunbrowned mirth, "country quicksilver," and country cheer. The royal blood of his happy health runs and riots in their rural vein. It is shown in his hearty and continuous way of working. It is proved by his great delight in common human nature, and his full satisfaction with the world as he found it. It is supremely shown in the nature of his whole work. A reigning cheerfulness was the sovereign quality of the man. And no one ever did so much in the poetic sphere to delight and make men nobly happy. The Shakspeare of the present version of the Sonnets is one in personality with the writer of the Poems and Plays, the Etching and the Bust.

The Kesselstadt Mask, weak, thin-lipped, consumptive-looking, and lacking in the backbone of character, is a likeness good enough for the Shakspeare evolved by a wrong reading of the Sonnets. But these two are as opposite as substance and shadow, different as life from death. The bust is a gloriously real if a rough embodiment of the man. The Mask is a fitting representative of the diseased Ideal of Shakspeare.

It is pleasant to think of our great Poet so amply reaping the fruits of his industry and prudence early in life, and spending his calm latter days in the old home of his boyhood which he had left a-foot and come back to in the saddle. The date of his retirement from London cannot be determined. I am decidedly of opinion that it was before the publication of the Sonnets in 1609, and other circumstances seem to indicate that he was living at Stratford in 1608, in the August of which year he sued Addenbroke; on the 6th of September, his 1 Shakspeare Society's Papers, vol. ii. p. 10.

Mother was buried; and, on the 16th of October, he was sponsor at the baptism of Henry Walker's son.

He had the feeling, inexpressibly strong with Englishmen, for owning a bit of this dear land of ours and living in one's own house; paying rent to no man. We know how he clung to his native place all through his London life, strengthening his rootage there all the while. We learn how he went back once a year to the field-flowers of his childhood, to hear in the leaves the whispers of LongAgo and "get some green "-as Chaucer says-where the overflowing treasure of youth had, dew-like, given its glory to the grass, its freshness to the flower, and climb the hills up which the boy had run, and loiter along the lanes where he had courted his wife as they two went slowly on the way to Shottery, and the boy thought Anne Hathaway fair whilst lingering in the tender twilight, and the honeysuckles smelled sweet in the dusk, and the star of love shone over them, and shook with tremulous splendour, and Willie's arm was round her, and in their eyes would glisten the dews of that most balmy time.

We might fancy, too, that on the stage, when he was playing some comparatively silent part, his heart would steal away and the audience melt from before his face, as he wandered back to where the reeds were sighing by Avon stream, and the nightingale was singing in the Wier-brake just below Stratford Church, and the fond fatherly heart took another look at the grave of little Hamnet-patting it, as it were, with an affectionate "Come to you, little one, by and by," and the play was like an unsubstantial pageant faded in the presence of that scenery of his soul.

Only we know what a practical fellow he was, and if any such thought came into his mind, it would be put back with a "lie thou there, Sweetheart," and he would have addressed himself more sturdily than ever to the business in hand.

At last he had come back to live and write; die and be buried at home. He had returned to the old place laden with honours and bearing his sheaves with him; wearing the crown invisible to most of his neighbours, but having also such possessions as they could appreciate. They looked up to him now, for the son of poor John Shakspeare, the despised deer-stealer and player, had become a most respectable man, able to spend £500 or so a year amongst them. He could sit under his own vine, and watch the ongoings of country life whilst waiting for the sunset of his own; nestle in the bosom of his own family, walk forth in his own fields, plant his mulberry-tree, compose several of his noblest dramas, and ripen for his rest in the place where he had climbed for birds'-nests, and, as they say, poached for deer by moonlight. I think he must have enjoyed it all vastly. He entered into local plans, listened to the tongue of Tradition babbling in the mouth of the old folks, "Time's doting chronicles ;" and astonished his fellowtownsmen by his business habits. And they would like him too, if only because he was so practical by habit, so English in feeling. We know that he fought on their side in resisting an encroachment upon Welcomb Common. He "could not bear the enclosing of Welcomb," he said. We feel, however, that as he moved amongst these honest, unsuspecting folk, with so grave and douce a face, he must have had internal ticklings at times, and quite enough to do to keep quiet those sprites of mirth and mischief lurking in the corners of his mouth and in the twinkle of his eyes as he thought how much capital he had made out of them, and how he had taken their traits of character to market, and turned them into the very money to which his fellow-townsmen were so respectful now.