have been one of the most familiar landmarks of Stratford in his eyes. He saw it when he came, a schoolboy, from his father's house in Henley Street, and turned into High Street; and from his own home at New Place he must have looked at it from all his southern windows. The interior of the Chapel has suffered many things at the hands of iconoclasts and restorers, but remains substantially as Shakespeare knew it. The low ceilings and old furnishings of the Grammar School, blackened with time, make one aware, like the much initialed and defaced forms in the older rooms at Eton, that education in England has a long history.

In Shakespeare's time the Renaissance influence was at its height, and the schools were bearing the fruits of the new learning. Education was essentially literary, and dealt almost exclusively with the humanities. Greek was probably within reach of boys of exceptional promise as students; but Latin was every boy's daily food. With Plautus and Terence, the masters of Latin comedy, with Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, the masters of Latin poetry, with Cicero the orator and Seneca the moralist, Shakespeare made early acquaintance. When Sir Hugh Evans, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," listens to the recitation, so familiar to all boys of English blood, of Hic, Hæc, Hoc, we are doubtless sharing a reminiscence of the poet's school days. The study of grammar and the practice of conversation prepared the way for the reading of the classic writers, and furnished an education which was not only disciplinary but invigo

rating. Without being in any sense a scholar, there is abundant evidence that Shakespeare knew other languages and literatures than his own. His knowl

edge was of the kind which a man of his quality of mind and educational opportunities might be expected to possess. It was entirely subordinate to the end of furnishing the material he wished to use; it was vital rather than exact; it was used freely, without any pretension to thoroughness; it served immediate ends with the highest intelligence, and is inaccurate with the indifference of a poet who was more concerned with the sort of life led in Bohemia than with its boundary lines. The great artists have been noted for their insight rather than their accuracy; not because they have been untrained, but because they have used facts simply to get at truth. Shakespeare could be as accurate as a scientist when exactness served his purpose, as the description of the Dover Cliff in "King Lear" shows.

In the plays there are recurring evidences that the poet knew Virgil and Ovid, and had not forgotten Lily's grammar and the "Sententiæ Pueriles," which the schoolboys of his time committed to memory as a matter of course. In a number of instances he used the substance of French and Italian books of which English translations had not been made in his time. The command of French and Italian for reading purposes, to a boy of Shakespeare's quickness of mind. and power of rapid assimilation, with his knowledge of Latin and the widespread interest among men of his class in the literature of both countries, was easily

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acquired. It must be remembered that for thirty years Shakespeare was on intimate terms with men of scholarly tastes and acquirements. The most splendid tribute among the many which he received from his contemporaries came from the most thoroughly trained of his fellow-dramatists; one who stood preeminently for the classical tradition in the English drama. Shakespeare was neither by instinct nor opportunity a scholar in the sense in which Ben Jonson was a scholar; but he had considerable familiarity with four languages; he had access to many books; he had read some of them with the most vital insight; and he was exceptionally well informed in many directions.

He knew something of law, medicine, theology, history, trade; and this knowledge, easily acquired, was readily used for purposes of illustration; sometimes used inaccurately as regards details, as men of imagination have used knowledge in all times and are using it to-day; but used always with divination of its spiritual or artistic significance. A careful study of Shakespeare's opportunities and a little common sense in reckoning with his genius will dissipate the confusion of mind which has made it possible to regard him as uneducated and therefore incapable of writing his own works. Aubrey's statement that "he understood Latin pretty well" is abundantly verified by the plays; they also furnish evidence that he understood Italian and French.

That he studied the Bible, either in the Genevan version or in the revision of 1568, is equally apparent. His references to incidents in Biblical history and his

use of Biblical phrases suggest a familiarity acquired in boyhood rather than a habit of reading in maturity. The direct suggestions of the influence of the Bible are numerous; but there is also the impression of a rich and frequent use of Biblical wisdom and imagery. Mr. Locke Richardson has suggested that when Falstaff "babbled of green fields" his memory was going back to the days when, as a schoolboy, the Twentythird Psalm was often in his ears or on his lips; and there are many places in the plays where Shakespeare seems to be remembering something which he learned from the Bible in youth. No collection of books could have brought him richer material for his view of life and for his art, not only as regards its content but its form.

The Grammar School, in which Cicero and Virgil have been taught in unbroken succession since Shakespeare's time, was a free school, taking boys of the neighbourhood from seven years upwards, and keeping them on the benches with generous disregard of hours. There were holidays, however, and there was time for punting on the river, for rambles across country, and for those noisy games, prolonged far into the evening by the long English twilight, which make the meadows across the Avon as vocal as the old graveyard about the church is reposeful and silent.

Boys in Shakespeare's station in life rarely went to school after their fourteenth year, and the growing financial embarrassments of John Shakespeare probably took his son out of the Grammar School a year earlier. The tide of prosperity had begun to recede

from the active trader some time earlier; whether his declining fortunes were due to lack of judgment or to the accidents of a business career it is impossible to determine. It is clear that he was a man of energy and versatility; that he was successful at an unusually early age and in an unusual degree; and that later, for a time at least, he was overtaken by adversity. In 1578, when the poet was fourteen years old, John Shakespeare mortgaged his wife's property at Wilmcote for the sum of forty pounds, or about two hundred dollars the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars in present values. In the following year another piece of property at Snitterfield was disposed of for the same amount. Unsatisfied or dissatisfied creditors began to bring suits; taxes went unpaid; other properties were sold without arresting the downward movement; in 1586, when the poet went up to London to seek his fortune, John Shakespeare had ceased to attend the meetings at Guild Hall, and lost his right to wear the Alderman's gown in consequence; later his goods were seized by legal process and warrants for his arrest as an insolvent debtor were issued. There is a story of a considerable loss through the generous act of standing as surety for a brother; and it is known that there was, during these years, great distress in several branches of trade in Warwickshire.

If it cost nothing to send a boy to the Grammar School, it cost something to keep him there; and by the withdrawal of his son when losses began to press heavily upon him John Shakespeare may not only have cut off one source of his expense, but gained some