last century are still to be found there. Other and perhaps more famous names have taken the places of those which were erased, and the walls are now a mass of hieroglyphs. Scott, Byron, Rogers, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, have left this record of their interest in the room. No new names are now written on these blackened walls; the names of visitors are kept in a record-book on the lower floor.

In a small room behind the birth-room what is known as the Stratford portrait of the poet is shown. On the first floor, opening from the room into which the visitor enters, is a larger room in which are collected a number of very interesting articles connected with the poet. There are to be seen the deed which conveyed the property to his father; the letter in which Richard Quiney, whose son Thomas married the poet's youngest daughter, Judith, in 1616, asked him for a loan of money; the seal ring on which the letters W. S. are engraved; the desk which stood in the Grammar School three hundred years ago; and many other curiosities, memorials, documents, and books which find proper place in such a museum. the garden, sweet with the fragrant breath of summer, there are pansies and violets, columbines and rosemary, daisies and rue - flowers which seem to belong to Shakespeare, since they bloom in the plays as if they first struck root in the rich soil of his imagination. This property, which remained continuously in the possession of Shakespeare's kin until the beginning of the present century, is now set apart forever, with the home of Anne Hathaway, the ground which the poet

In

purchased in 1597, and where he built his own home, and the adjoining house, as memorials of the poet's life in Stratford.

John Shakespeare prospered in private fortune and in public advancement for nearly a decade after the birth of the poet. His means were very considerable for the time and place, and as Bailiff and chief Alderman he was the civic head of the community. An ingenious attempt has been made to prove that he was a man of Puritan temper and associations; but the fact that he applied for a grant of arms, and that as Bailiff he welcomed the actors of the Earl of Worcester's Company and the Queen's Company to Stratford in 1568, would seem to indicate that, whatever his religious convictions and ecclesiastical tendencies may have been, he did not share the fanatical temper of some of his contemporaries.

The child William, then four years old, may have seen these companies, bravely dressed, with banners flying, drums beating, and trumpeters sounding their ringing tones, riding over Clopton bridge and halting in the market-place where High and Bridge Streets intersect, and where the market, with its belfry and clock, now stands. The players of the day led a wandering life, full of vicissitude, but, in fair weather and a hospitable community, they brought with them a visible if sometimes shabby suggestion of the great London world, which made their occasional coming into a quiet town like Stratford an unforgettable occurrence. The horses they rode were gayly caparisoned, the banners they carried were splendidly emblazoned

with the arms of their patrons, their costumes were rich and varied, and they were accompanied by grooms and servants of all sorts. A goodly company they must have seemed to a child's imagination, with an air of easy opulence worn as a part of their vocation, but as purely imitative as the parts they played to crowds of open-mouthed rustics. Their magnificence, however shabby, and their brave air, however swaggering, made rural England feel as if it had touched the great new world of adventure and fame and wealth, of which stories were told in every chim

ney corner.

To these companies of players Stratford appears to have given exceptional hospitality; the people of the place were lovers of the drama. In the course of two decades the town enjoyed no less than twenty-four visits from strolling companies; a fact of very obvious bearing on the education of Shakespeare's imagination and the bent of his mind toward a vocation. In such a community there must have been constant talk about plays and players, and easy familiarity with the resources and art of the actor. It follows, too, that the presence of so many players in the little village brought boys of an inquiring turn of mind into personal contact with the comedians and tragedians of the day. As a boy, Shakespeare came to know the old English plays which were the stock in trade of the travelling companies; he learned the stage business, and he was undoubtedly on terms of familiarity with men of gift and art. For the purposes of his future work this education was far more stimulating and

formative than any which he could have secured at Eton or Winchester during the same impressionable years. Scott's specific training for the writing of the Waverley novels and the narrative poems which bear his name was gained in his ardent reading and hearing of old Scotch ballads, romances, stories, and history, rather than in the lecture-rooms of the University of Edinburgh. Shakespeare has sometimes been represented as a boy of obscure parentage and vulgar surroundings; he was, as a matter of fact, the son of a man of energy and substance, the foremost citizen of Stratford. He has often been represented as wholly lacking educational opportunities; he was, as a matter of fact, especially fortunate in educational opportunities of the most fertilizing and stimulating kind. The singular misconception which has identified education exclusively with formal academic training has made it possible to hold men of the genius of Shakespeare, Burns, and Lincoln before the world as exceptions to the law that no art can be mastered save through a thorough educational process. If Burns and Lincoln were not so near us, the authorship of “Tam o' Shanter" and the Gettysburg address would have been challenged on the ground of inadequate preparation for such masterpieces of expression.

These three masters of speech were exceptionally well educated for their art, for no man becomes an artist except by the way of apprenticeship; but their education was individual rather than formal, and liberating rather than disciplinary. The two poets were saturated in the most sensitive period in the

unfolding of the imagination with the very genius of the people among whom they were to work and whose deepest instincts they were to interpret. Their supreme good fortune lay in the fact that they were educated through the imagination rather than through the memory and the rationalizing faculties. Homer, Æschylus, and Sophocles were educated by the same method; so also was Dante. A man sometimes gets this kind of education in the schools, but he oftener misses it. He is always supremely fortunate if he gets it at all. Shakespeare received it from several sources; one of them being the love of the drama in the town in which he was born, access to its records of every sort, and acquaintanceship with the custodians of its traditions and the practitioners of its art.

But he was by no means lacking in educational opportunities of a formal kind. The Grammar School on Church Street, adjoining the Guild Chapel and across Chapel Lane from the site of the poet's later home, one of the oldest and most picturesque buildings now standing in Stratford, was founded at the close of the fifteenth century. It was part of an older religious foundation, of which the Chapel still remains, and which once included a hospital. After passing through many vicissitudes, the school was reconstituted in the time of Edward VI. The Chapel was used in connection with it, and, if tradition is to be accepted, was occasionally employed for school purposes. It was built about the middle of the thirteenth century, and is a characteristic bit of the England which Shakespeare saw. The low, square tower must