with it-there can be little doubt; but that he had any other object than the perfect putting of human nature upon the stage, in a paying style, there is no proof.

With a kingly manly character upon his hands to work up in parts for Burbage, he probably watched the gait and words of England's natural kings in living and historic Britain, and gave this gait and these words, with the tone of his own harmonies, to his embryonic character; or, if he had royal poltroonery to portray, he could find it among his fellow-men, and acquire it cheaply, for a king-tinseled cheap man in "ye goodlie companie of her majesty's poore players."

To him the mimicry of mankind meant money, and money meant a house and lands for Will Shakspeare on Avon. He is the highest style of theatrical Englishman-the actor, in the widest sense-whose intellect could walk the "boards" of his imagination în buskined Anglo-Saxon. And such seems to me to be the end and aim of the man. The meaning of the rest of him is purely accidental. Like his own Polonius, if you think his cloud looks like a camel, it is to you a camel, so far as he cares; if a weasel, weasel goes to him it is the ware for sale.

The antiquarian critic, in some other field of investigation, may find a clay pot that has lain long buried in the compostheap of unwriting and unwritten races, and make much meaning out of its shape and the dim figures on the bulging sides, and place the vessel high up in his cabinet, as a rarity of great import; but if the old prehistoric hag, who probably molded, turned, and burned the pot for her own private use, were to come softly into the professor's study, and, leaning upon her rude stick, point her dirty skinny finger, and say in some unknown lingo, "That's my pot!" the romantic meaning would all fade out of its histo

ry, leaving only the fact that prehistoric old women made very good pots, considering the circumstances they lived under.

So if Shakspeare could walk into the studio of a Shakspearean anatomist and say:

"Sirrah, mark ye! those plays are mine,
And if it be that money may be made

Forth from their dusty rolls, that, too, is mine.
Ay, marry, and I want it!"

the romance would pass out of Shakspeare himself, leaving only the fact that he made very good stage-characters, considering the chance he had.

There was, so to speak, no medium of public ideas in his day, no real newslife, no hourly report of men and things and thought; and his presentation of what men might do or had done was, to folk in those old times, what the reporters' columns in the daily newspapers are to us. In these newspaper reports, which hold the mirror-often, the horrid mirror-up to nature, there is, in a course of years, everything, in every conceivable style, that pertains to the actions, feelings, fancies, etc., of men; yet we can not tell what are the morals, or the manners, or the impulses, the local habitation, or the names of the reporters. All we know of them is that their name is legion, and they write for pay. When permitted to use it, their fancy falls like a harlequin drapery over the humanity in the daily fact, and the citizen at breakfast smiles under his greasy mustache.

Shall men, in after years, gather these reports, or the better of them, into solid volumes, and proceed to analyze their hidden meaning and their hinted facts, and thus solve the moral status of the reporters, and try to lend a legendary dignity and a deliberate unity of design to works which were written "on the jump" and printed by steam? Forbid it, ye gods!

Or shall we let Mark Twain die, and

in future days dig his writings from oblivion, in order to determine how the jokes got into him, why they came out of him, and what were his notions of the immortality of his soul, without thinking that he wrote for money, joked for coin, and carried his immortality in his cheek?

It does not need that the art-man shall be any part of what he puts on paper, any more than that a preacher's soul shall be as lovely and faithful as the ideal in his eloquent sermon. Indeed, it is a solemn fact that the homelife of the artist, who paints sweet fancies on the finished canvas, is odorous of onion-stew and musical with buzzing flies-that his days are filled with labor, and his nights with lager-beer.

Certain persons are born with a susceptibility to certain impressions - not necessarily to a belief in those impressions and that susceptibility, driving or wooing such person in the line of those impressions, determines, under "your devil opportunity," for life the avocation of such individual, whether it leads across Niagara River on the highway of a single rope, or through Austerlitz and glory to a sea-girt solitude. The will of such a person is in that manner impowered that it can force the whole being into the service of this susceptibility, and, when the opportunity opens, so demean itself that men admiringly shall cry out, "Bully!"

With Shakspeare, the susceptibility was the mimicry of man; and all impressions leading to that end remained with him, the servants of his will, in his daily fight for bread and property. That this susceptibility enabled him to be momentarily a king-"ay, every inch a king" — there is no doubt; but that is no proof that he was either a ruling or a ruined monarch. That he could be a fool or any other thing ruled by a human attribute nobody doubts; but no one thinks he was a fool in fact.

From his works it were an easy thing to prove that William Shakspeare, in whom nature conspired with art to make from England's humbler dust the mouthpiece of mankind, was, after the measurement of ordinary men, trained to all trades, schooled in all schools, apprenticed to each profession, and carefully fostered in every faith. We could easily show that he was a most profound M. D.; in witness whereof, notice the living lunacy of Lear, side by side with the simulated madness of Edgar. Modern medical science, with all its improved microscopic powers of diagnosis, can not deliver a clinical discourse on the subtile and confusing diseases of the brain, comparable with the tragedy of King Lear; yet no one thinks of pretending that Shakspeare ever thundered in a mortar with a pounding-pestle, or put up petty paper packages of pills, squills, and tartar - emetic.

How futile it is, then, to endeavor to prove that he was a Christian, or this, or that, out of the mouths of his characters!

His is not the intellect which you can in the least, in any manner, steal away from the play-house to drop as a rich jewel at the foot of a cross. He belongs to the stage. He is the English stage. Behind the foot-lights of his wondrous varieties, you can find mankind, but you can not find the man Shakspeare.

In former days, not greatly remote, it was fashionable (even pious, as are all the graver fashions) to relegate Shakspeare to the old-style "pit" of the playhouse; and the "boys" down there, with that instinctive good taste which they sometimes loudly manifest, were glad to accept him, and boast of how he "poached deer," "'eld 'osses at Blackfriars," and "went afore 't squire to be vined," and "'ow 'e were a bootcher's lad, an' spaike a braive piece when 'e a hox's throwt 'ad cut”—in short, that

there was a touch of the "rounder" in him, which proved that he belonged to the "boys." And no doubt, in a great degree, he did; for in those days it was England's own blood that filled the "pit," while Normandy arrayed the "boxes." In another sense he belonged to the "pit;" because all successful actors and playwrights belong in some degree to that element in the house woe is to him who does not.

Then, in years drawn nearer to our time, the Normanism of England tried to show that he belonged to their class, to which end they traced him a fancied long lineage, phrenologized his head, unwove the lines of his stone-wrought effigy, and wrote him down pure Nor

man.

And not to be outdone as a claimant, Pat comes forward to aver that, "Be jabers, he waz born in Oireland!" where they have two skulls of him—one when he was a child, and the other when he was grown up to be a man. And this claim is about as rational as any of the other special claims; inasmuch as the great dramatist belongs to every place where his mother-tongue is spoken, not in dogma.

There is hardly any end to the efforts made to prove from Shakspeare's plays what Shakspeare was, outside of his office in the theatrical world. Even those ingenious fellows, the lawyers, like rows of rooks, have dropped softly from the atmosphere of Blackstone down upon the scenic stage, to strut about with knowing look, and exclaim: "Caw! this genius was bred an attorney. How else could he know and aptly use, with admirable fitness, so many of the 'quiddets and quillets' of our very honorable profession?"

How, indeed, could he have known the fitness of law-lingo? His father was a magistrate of the borough of Stratford; so much is history, and not drama. He may in fairness be said to have been

raised among law-forms. And there is no great force of imagination in picturing how his susceptible absorbing young intellect would grasp and play with the uncouth Latin sounds, until they and their various meanings and their nomeaning haunted his head through life. And if this were not enough to introduce him to the lore of law- phrases, it is pretty well believed, on good legendary grounds, there was another, a more impressive and a ruder introduction to the lip-service of the law, when Sir Thomas Lucy, whether for "deer-stealing," or for what not, prosecuted and reprosecuted him in the courts of justice; for which Shakspeare nearly immortalized the old "duffer" in the court of the muses. It is not difficult to imagineeven for a wild Americo-Anglo-Saxon to imagine-the father of English expressiveness coming into court, marshaled on his way by the ponderous dignity of the rural bailiff, and solemnly commanded to look upon the severe face of the magistrate; while the neighbor gossips, male and female, into whose sagacity had crept some homely touch of the prisoner's rare quality, smilingly loiter about, with the premonition that the court had, in the language of this new land, "caught a terranteler." these prosecutions his vivid young intelligence would undoubtedly photograph the print and image of the day-the sights and sounds, lights, shades, and variations-and in older years, giving the kaleidoscope of his imagination a half-turn, evolve you the Dogberries, the Vergeses, the Seacoals, the Shallows, and the long line of robustious periwig-pated pretenders of official ineptitude and pomposity.

It is a narrow-minded slur upon the abilities of Shakspeare to infer, after all this, that he must have been apprenticed to the study of law, to possess his power to use technical law-words aptly. As well may we say that he was groom to a

stallion, because among his very earliest productions he gave us Venus and Adonis, in which, as in a mirror, shine all the points and traits of an entire horse. Aside from what has now been said of his opportunity to hear what law-forms had to say, there is abundant documentary evidence in the Shakspearean archives that he and Richard Burbage and the "goodlie companie of her majesty's poor playeres" had often to resort to the law-forms of petition, etc., to be protected against the fanatical religious prejudices of that day—in order that "Black Friars" and "Ye Globe" might wake the foggy midnight echoes of the Thames with loud applause of that power which the posterity of a larger globe has nightly encored, with wild delight, through many generations.

And here, going off again under the pressure of the suggestive, we may not wonder, considering the heavy attempts which English religionists have made to squelch the "play - actors," that Shakspeare gives no sign of his adhesion to any form of superstition-rather was superstition his plaything. He peopled the world's fancy with a thousand sprites and goblins, and thereby played upon faith as upon a harp; but there is no proof that he worshiped the images of his own brain, or those of any other brains, ancient or modern.

The so-called Christians who now so gravely place the Bible and Shakspeare upon their family tables, side by side, as the guides to life, are the offspring of that lovely spirit which, not many generations agone, cast the volume of his dramas into the consuming fires of a righteous indignation, because it was. one of those "unsavory, bawdy, playhouse books." In regard to which spirit of persecution, if it were in point to draw upon his art (which it isn't), we might quote Launce-Launce, the sweetscented dog- man, in evidence of Shakspeare's ideal of a Christian. Launce,

VOL. 15.-31.

when summing up the qualities of his lady-love, says: "She hath more qualities than a water-spaniel, which is much in a bare Christian."

There is, though, a similarity between the Bible and Shakspeare's dramas. If God dictated the Bible, and if Shakspeare composed the Shakspearean volume, the similarity is, that the author of each can be proved by his works to be a promulgator of almost any form of faith.

If Shakspeare had any religious belief beyond the rules of right and wrong, and the "pricks and stings" of conscience, the "unco-pious" of his contemporaries took full means to cause him to "dry up" on all such matters. The godly lord-mayor and corporation having driven the actors outside the corporate limits of London, the God-fearing must needs follow "ye poore playeres" out to that monument of Christian benevolence, the puritanic ruins of the ancient monastery of Black Friars; and there in that ghostly retreat of the muses, command the play to cease and the applause to expire, as may be seen by this humble petition, which is here copied from a reprint of the papers of Lord Ellesmere, the attorney-general:

"These are to certifie your right Hon'ble Lordships, that her Majesty's poore Playeres, James Burbadge, Richard Burbadge, John Laneham, Thomas Greene, Robert Wilson, John Taylor, Anth. Wadeson, Thomas Pope, George Peele, Augustine Phillipps, Nicholas Towley, William Shakspeare, William Kempe, William Johnson, Baptiste Goodale, and black Fryer's playe-house, have never given cause of displeasure, in that they have brought into their playes maters of state and Religion, unfitt to be handled by them, or to be presented before lewde spectators: neither hath anie complaynte in that kinde ever bene preferrde against them, or anie of them. Wherefore, they trust most humble in your Lordship's consideration of their former good behavior, being at all tymes readie and willing to yielde obedi. ence to any command whatsoever your Lordships in your wisdome may thinke in such case meete, etc. "November, 1589."

Robert Armyn, being all of them sharers in the

It will be seen by this that William Shakspeare, at the age of twenty-six