I think no one can well doubt after reading the evidence Mr. Sidney Lee marshals in support of that view, provided he be capable of weighing evidence rightly and dispassionately. They are essentially objective, and give expression to states of mind and feeling which, in those days, it was thought becoming, and even necessary, that a young writer advancing claims to be regarded as a poet should entertain; and Shakespeare, born dramatist and born actor as he was, threw himself by virtue of his imagination and his rich, ready vocabulary into those feelings with such complete success that the incautious have built on the "Sonnets" speculations and even theories that lack all foundation, when once the true and full nature of his genius is apprehended. Similarly, in " Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," he manifests that ample command of language and that power of preserving an almost hard and fast line between one character and another so conspicuous in his plays; though it should be added that, even in these last, he sacrifices the distinction without hesitation or scruple, where not to do so would hamper the action of the piece; action, or the unfolding of the story, being the most important matter in a stage-play.

It is often said that we know nothing about Shakespeare, the man. It seems to me there is no one about whom I know so much. For what is knowledge respecting a person? Is it the precise day of his birth, and of his death? Is it the colour of his hair and eyes, the exact number of his inches in height and chest measurement, or the customary style of his dress? These may

be interesting matters for the curious, but they are scarcely the essential or really instructive facts concerning a man. The essential and most informing things respecting him are what he thought and felt, what he said when he truly meant what he was saying, what was the main occupation and what the general tenor of his life, what his reputed disposition, and what his conduct in the practical every-day affairs of existence. Bearing the above distinction in mind, let us ask what we know for certain concerning Shakespeare.

1st. As to the time and date in which he lived and wrote.

2d. The social conditions, according to the ideas and educational opportunities of his time, in which he was born.

3d. What kind of woman he married, and how did the marriage he contracted, as the phrase is, turn out, and to what extent, and in what manner, did it influence his life and his conduct towards his children.

4th. What were his views as to Life, Government, Law, Society, external Nature, Art, the relation of Man and Woman, and finally as to the World not seen, and necessarily, therefore, only surmised.

To answer these questions in the above order, Shakespeare was born in A.D. 1564, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and died in 1616, in the reign of James I; but his principal works were written between 1591 and 1611, or between his twenty-seventh and forty-seventh year. The period covered by these dates was the very height and heart of the Epoch of the Renaissance in

England, following swiftly on what is called the Reformation, justly described by Tennyson as a "spacious time." It is no slight advantage for a man, and for a poet especially, to live in a spacious as contra-distinguished from a narrow and quietistic age. But the advantage fully avails only a poet who has, at one and the same time, a due admixture of Receptivity and Resistance; and Shakespeare possessed both those qualities in about equal proportion. Endowed with too great an amount of Receptivity, he would have welcomed both the Reformation and the Renaissance with unquestioning and excessive enthusiasm. Gifted with too large a share of Resistance, he might have looked on them with displeasure and suspicion, and even have manifested prejudice and hostility towards them. Endued with a perfectly balanced mind, he confronted them with sympathetic but not servile hospitality, "looked before and after," as was his saying, and his own wont, and thoroughly understood them, as he understood all things that are to be in any way understood by mortals.

In the second place, Shakespeare was born, according to the ideas and educational opportunities of the England of that day, in a relatively humble but certainly not a lowly rank of life, and came of people self-respecting and respected, thoroughly well-grounded in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and who deemed it their duty, and a point of class honour, to give their sons the opportunities of book education afforded by the local Grammar School, whereby they could obtain an ample knowledge of their own tongue, and a smattering of Latin and

French. Moreover, rich territorial noblemen were inviting to their country seats at that time Italian craftsmen, imbued with the architectural principles and decorative ideas of the Renaissance; and from these intelligent workers Englishmen in much the same station of life had opportunities of hearing something of Italy and other Continental countries and languages, in our day denied to people in the absence of foreign travel. Moreover, a Priesthood, both Secular and Regular, still not wholly severed from Rome, had much noninsular information of no small educational service to Englishmen, who, in every age, as all the world knows, are somewhat prone to insularity of knowledge and feeling.

Such were some of the educational opportunities offered to Shakespeare; and one may be quite sure that, bringing into the world with him the electrically quick apprehension of Genius, he quickly turned them to account, to an extent denied to the average human being. No surprise, therefore, need be felt, though it is so often expressed, at the apparently wide knowledge of men, things, and books shown by Shakespeare from the first moment at which he began to write. Far from moving about, in Wordsworth's well-known phrase, in worlds not realised, he realised them very early in life, and instinctively idealised them by what in later years he called, through the mouth of Prospero, "my so potent Art," in other words, his transforming Imagination. But scholastic teaching, mere book-learning, and even converse with men of diverse tongues and nationalities, did

not by any means constitute the main and most valuable ingredients in Shakespeare's early education. I have spoken of the rank of life in which he was born; and it is an inexpressible advantage to a poet of great native genius to pass the earlier years of his life among people of not too lowly a condition to have any but a small and narrow view of existence shut out from them, withal of not so lofty and comfortable a condition as to be more or less divorced by artificial manners and restraints from the frank manifestations of human nature, to take all that happens to them, and all they see and hear, as a matter of course, and to lack the spur and stimulus of a desire for personal improvement and advancement. No English poet who can be accurately described as of great eminence came of an absolutely ignorant, uneducated stock, and only one English poet of what is called in England the higher titular rank- Byron - can be justly described as a poet of conspicuous distinction. But Byron, in addition to his own volcanic genius, was not handicapped in any disadvantageous degree by the native accident of being a peer. His family was relatively obscure, and its means were narrow; and had he not filled the world with his fame as a poet, he would, merely as the Lord Byron of the period, have been known even by name to not one in ten thousand of his countrymen. It was one of the great native advantages of Shakespeare that he came of people half-yeomen, half-tradesmen, had a sound, thorough, grammar-school education, and that his original condition necessitated his consorting, in early life, with men and women who make no attempt to conceal