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fame? The love of praise and the handing down to posterity of a work that cannot die, these have been occasions and helps to poetic art, as even Dante confesses to us. Do they write to do good and to teach. mankind? Yes, this has been one motive to artistic production, and Milton's "Paradise Lost" seeks to "justify the ways of God to man.”

And yet we maintain that no great poetry was ever written with any one of these as its sole, or even its ruling, motive. These may serve as occasions, they may give the pen its start; but, unless the writer is lifted above them, no poem of permanent value is the result. For here is no spontaneity and no joy, but rather external or internal constraint. All great poetry is a work of freedom, as well as of necessity. The poet creates, as God creates, simply to express the world of thought and beauty within. The surging life of humanity becomes self-conscious in the poet's breast. He must "speak forth the things which he has seen and heard" without regard to consequence or reward. The great poets forget themselves in their themes. We know much of Achilles, but little of Homer. And if Shakespeare is the greatest poet of the world, it is not wonderful that this rule should apply to him most of all, and that we should know much about Macbeth, but little about Shakespeare.

We can now perceive the mingled truth and error in M. Taine's contention that our poet was the child of the Renaissance. Every great artist is in part the product of his time, and Shakespeare gathered up and expressed all that there was of rich and rare in that most stirring age. The revival of learning reached distant England

almost a century after it had begun in Italy, but delay only increased the volume and power of the wave. The Reformation had added an ethical and purifying element to what was originally a mere outburst of intellectual energy, and the ferocity of medieval manners had been somewhat tamed. The defeat of the Armada had freed England from the fear of Spain; the beheading of the Queen of Scots had freed England from internal foes.

It was an age of adventure and discovery. The world had doubled in size, and transatlantic treasures had been poured into the lap of Europe. The Bermudas gave to Shakespeare his "still-vexed Bermoothes," and the heathen cannibal gave him his Caliban. Imagination was provided with material both modern and classical, at the same time that it was emancipated from the superstitions of the past. Elizabeth, the virgin queen, mistress of the seas and commanding the enthusiastic loyalty of her subjects, was a lover and promoter of literature. Never before since the victory of the Greeks over Persia, was a nation so on the top-wave of freedom and achievement. The very breathing of the air was exhilaration, and hope could never hope too much in the breast of the poet.

What an instrument was then made ready to his hand in our English mother-tongue! The Norman had enriched it with all the dignity and sonorous charm of the Latin; the Saxon had furnished its solid foundation of simple, forthright, hearty, pathetic speech. Spenser had subdued its harshness into the melody and harmony of poetry; Sidney had shown how rhythmical and yet how vigorous might be its prose. The language was no hack, with regular, funereal gait, but a colt just put to

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harness, a compound of grace and of intense vitality, ready for all manner of sudden excursions from the beaten track.

What we now call word-coining, and occasionally tolerate as poetic license, was the business of the Elizabethan poet, and the new words had all the brilliancy and beauty of counters fresh from the mint. The age had a peculiar feeling for artistic form-form and substance indeed had not yet been divorced. English had not yet acquired the stiffness of Puritanism. To use the words of Lord Bacon, it had the very "sparkle of the purity of man's first estate." Dramatic poetry had begun to use it for its vehicle. The coarse and bloody tragedies of an earlier time had given place to plays in which there was at least some effort at rational development of character, and Shakespeare himself, in alluding to Marlowe, could speak of

The proud, full sail of his great verse.

The poet was born indeed in a mighty time, but the time can never wholly account for the poet. Shakespeare was born, not made; nurture did much for him, but nature did more. When M. Taine calls him the child of the Renaissance, he forgets that the Renaissance had other children not so great. Ben Jonson, as well as Marlowe, had more of learning and more of training in the schools. They were children of the Renaissance, but they were not Shakespeares.

His

The French critic has little faith in personality. philosophy is the philosophy of materialism: man is the product of his surroundings. Against such a philosophy Shakespeare, like Homer, will ever be an unanswerable

argument. Here is a new force in history, for which the past cannot account. Humanity reaches a new stage of development in him. The characters which he creates do not belong peculiarly to the Renaissance, they belong to universal humanity. Ben Jonson nobly recognized the essential quality of Shakespeare's genius, when he declared his work to be "not of an age, but for all time."

And this suggests the final and sufficient reason why the plays of our great dramatist can never be referred to Lord Bacon as their author. Bacon was the child of the Renaissance. He represents the critical and inquiring spirit. His aim was to bring philosophy down from its ideal heights, and to set it at study of concrete facts. He could doubtless have adopted Luther's characterization of Aristotle as "a damned mischief-making heathen." There is probably in all literature no greater contrast of method and spirit than that between Shakespeare's intuitive grasp of human character and life on the one hand and Bacon's careful gathering of instances and induction of generals from particulars on the other. The "final causes" which Aristotle taught, and which Bacon hated, were the very life-blood of Shakespeare. To fancy Francis of Verulam writing "Midsummer Night's Dream" or or "The Tempest" is to imagine at dray-horse soaring like Pegasus.

The education of such a genius must have been a course of liberal training to those who taught him. So active and aspiring a mind, with his manifold questions, must have made trouble for the doctors in the temple. It is by no means certain that he did much of regular study at the Free Grammar School of Stratford, but his

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occasional introduction of Latin lines, and especially his use of words derived from the Latin in a new and etymological sense, show that he picked up that language in a very practical way. And though he is said to have had less Greek than Latin, I cannot explain the long succession of questions and answers in single lines of "King Richard III." except by supposing that these monostichs were suggested by the reading of Euripides, or by overhearing the recitation of it in the schoolroom.

When it comes to the writing of "Antony and Cleopatra," or "Troilus and Cressida," we find that Shakespeare has drunk in the very spirit and genius of Greek and Roman times; indeed, in his portraiture of Ulysses, he takes Homer's hints about the man of many wiles, and makes Ulysses reveal himself in speech with a fullness and consistency of which Homer himself would have been incapable.

Schools or no schools, Shakespeare would have appropriated, and he did appropriate, all the secular knowledge of his time. Essays have been written to prove that he must have been at different times a lawyer, a physician, and a soldier. He probably was none of them. we not reasonably believe that he tells the story of his own mental growth when, in "Cymbeline" (1 : 1:43), he makes a gentleman say of Posthumus, that the king

Puts him to all the learnings that his time

Could make him the receiver of; which he took
As we do air, fast as 'twas ministered;

And in his spring became a harvest.

May

In a similar way we may interpret what seem at first sight to be intimations of a wild and dissolute youth.