two nations into war, the world follows their movements with prying, wondering eyes; but heretofore when they only amused, or even instructed, they must have achieved fame, and a generation or two must have passed away before the world at large concerned itself about their personal histories. We know more of the lives of brutal, selfish soldiers, and of crafty, selfish churchmen, who had no thought or purpose beyond the attainment or the preservation of power and place for themselves and their adherents, than we do of men whose quiet, thoughtful labors have blessed and delighted millions from generation to generation. Of Shakespeare we know more than the Greeks knew of Eschylus, the father of their tragedy, or of Aristophanes, the father of their comedy, two centuries after they died. Public functions partially preserved the personal history of Sophocles from similar obscurity. Of Molière, the greatest and most original of French dramatic writers, we have very meagre personal accounts; and it is remarkable that not a page of his manuscripts is known to be in existence. The personal history of Shakespeare's great contemporary, Bacon, is well known; but had he not become successively the King's Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England, Master Bacon might have written his Essays and worked out his Novum Organon in happy, unobserved obscurity, and

the world might have begun to inquire into his every-day life only after it had discovered that he was the greatest philosopher and the worldlywisest man of modern times. We are yet more ignorant of Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen than we are of him. Of Beaumont and Fletcher, both born in the rank of gentry, one the son of a Judge, the other of a Bishop, we know little more than that they wrote their plays and lived in the society of the most intelligent men of their day. Chapman's associations and what he did are discovered only by indirect collateral evidence; but eminent as he was, and highly esteemed as he appears to have been, nothing is recorded of his personal history. We are obliged to infer the year of his birth from the record of his age upon his portrait; and time has left us no guide-post to his birthplace. The minor stars of the Elizabethan galaxy, the Greenes, Peeles, Marlowes, Websters, Fords, and such like, left hardly a trace behind them which their own pens had not written. Ben Jonson, who lived to see all the poets of the Elizabethan period in their graves, and to be an object of literary and almost antiquarian interest to a new generation and a new school, left more materials for his memoirs than any contemporary poet. But it is only with his later years that we are thus acquainted. Of his youth and early manhood we are not less ignorant than we are of Shakespeare's.

How difficult it is to trace the vestiges of a life not passed in the performance of important public duty is shown by our ignorance of the youth and early manhood of the last great English ruler of England, Oliver Cromwell: — last English ruler; for since his time his place has been occupied, not filled, by certain Scotch and German men and women, sons and daughters of Scotch fathers and German fathers and mothers, not always even born in the British purple. Although he came, on both sides, of families of knightly rank and landed estate, and made him-' self in effect absolute monarch of England and of Scotland south of the Grampians, the little that we know of him before he rose, at mature years, into notice in public life, is gathered from obscure tradition and official mention. We know more of William Shakespeare, yeoman's son and player, before he was forty years old, than we do of Oliver Cromwell, country gentleman and Lord Protector, at the same age. The same degree of doubt exists as to the occupation of the father of each of them, and the same uncertainty as to how and where they passed certain years of early life; the debatable period being longer in the case of the Protector. The same truth in biography is illustrated by a striking deficiency in the biography of Washington. We are well and authoritatively informed as to the small details of his daily life after he entered the service of the

revolted Colonies; but his own nephew, to whom were open all family papers and records, and who was in communication with many of the friends and neighbors of his illustrious uncle, was unable to discover the date of his marriage, although his wife, Mrs. Custis, was one of the richliest dowered widows in all Virginia.* Instead, therefore, of our ignorance of Shakespeare's life being in itself at all remarkable, we have reason for congratulation, that from one source or another we have learned so much upon a subject which interests us so greatly, but about which his generation and its successor were so indifferent.

Unlike Dante, unlike Milton, unlike Goethe, unlike the great poets and tragedians of Greece and Rome, Shakespeare left no trace upon the political, or even the social, life of his era. Of his eminent countrymen, Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wotton, and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries; and yet there is no proof whatever that he was personally known to either of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers, and artists of his day, except the few of his fellowcraftsmen whose acquaintance with him has been

* George Washington Parke Custis's Recollections of Washington, p. 502.

heretofore mentioned in these Memoirs. This, partly from the loss of evidence, and partly, perhaps, because he was not personally acquainted with any of these men. It is a common mistake to suppose that, even in these days of free intercourse, eminent persons who are contemporaries and countrymen must needs be brought into contact. Their personal relations, like those of other persons, are governed by prudential reasons and social influences, — greatly also by mere accident. Shakespeare's character, entirely free from those irregularities which are usually, but unreasonably, regarded as almost the necessary concomitants of genius, seems to have been of singular completeness and of perfect balance. Of his transcendent mental gifts, the results of the daily labor by which he first earned his bread and then made his fortune remain as evidence; and what else we know of him shows him to us in the common business and intercourse of life, upright, prudent, self-respecting, a man to be respected and relied upon. An actor at a time when actors were held in the lowest possible esteem, he won the kind regard and consideration of those who held high rank and station: a poet, he was not only thrifty but provident. Though careful of his own, he was not only just, but generous, to others. His integrity was early noticed; and Jonson says "he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." Surpassing all his rivals, after the recoil of the