daughters, he left, as we have seen, the whole of his estate, the whole of his real property indeed, to his eldest daughter Mrs. Susanna Hall, with a strict entail to the heirs of her body. This indicates in the strongest manner the fixed desire of his heart to take a permanent position in the locality, and, if possible, strike the family roots deeply into roots deeply into their native soil. That this purpose was realised in his own case seems clear from the special respect paid to his memory. He was buried, as we have seen, in the chancel of the parish church, where as a rule only persons of family and position could be interred. His monument, one of the most considerable in the church, holds a place of honour on the north wall of the chancel, just above the altar railing. While this tribute of marked official respect may be due in part, as the epitaph intimates, to his eminence as a poet, it was no doubt, in a country district like Stratford, due still more to his local importance as a landed proprietor of wealth and position. Indeed, as a holder of the great tithes he was by custom and courtesy entitled to burial in the chancel.

If there is truth in the early tradition that Shakespeare originally left Stratford in consequence of the sharp prosecution of Sir Thomas Lucy, who resented with narrow bitterness and pride the presumption and audacity of the high-spirited youth found trespassing on his grounds, the victim of his petty wrath was in the end amply avenged. After a career of unexampled success in London Shakespeare returned to his native town crowned with wealth and honours, and, having spent the last years of his life in cordial intercourse with his old friends and fellow-townsmen, was followed to the

grave with the affectionate respect and regret of the whole Stratford community. This feeling was indeed, we may justly assume, fully shared by all who had ever known the great poet. His contemporaries and associates unanimously bear witness to Shakespeare's frank, honourable, loving nature. Perhaps the most striking expression of this common feeling comes from one who in character, disposition, and culture was so different from Shakespeare as his friend and fellow-dramatist Ben Jonson. Even his rough and cynical temper could not resist the charm of Shakespeare's genial character and

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gracious ways. 'I loved the man," he says, "and do

honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions." As the genius of Shakespeare united the most opposite gifts, so amongst his friends are found the widest diversity of character, endowment, and disposition. This is only another way of indicating the breadth of his sympathies, the variety of his interests, the largeness and exuberant vitality of his whole nature. He touched life at so many points, and responded so instinctively to every movement in the complex web of its throbbing activities, that nothing affecting humanity was alien either to his heart or brain. To one so gifted with the power of looking below the surface of custom and convention, and perceiving, not only the deeper elements of rapture and anguish to which ordinary eyes are blind, but the picturesque, humorous, or pathetic varieties of the common lot, every form of human experience, every type of character, would have an attraction of its own. In the view of such a mind nothing would be common or unclean. To Shakespeare all aspects of life, even the

humblest, had points of contact with his own. He could talk simply and naturally without a touch of patronage or condescension to a hodman on his ladder, a costermonger at his stall, the tailor on his board, the cobbler in his combe, the hen-wife in her poultry-yard, the ploughman in his furrow, or the base mechanicals at the wayside country inn. He could watch with full and humorous appreciation the various forms of brief authority and petty officialism, the bovine stolidity and empty consequence of the local Dogberries and Shallows, the strange oaths and martial swagger of a Pistol, a Bardolph, or a Parolles, the pedantic talk of a Holofernes, the pragmatical saws of a Polonius, or the solemn absurdities of a self-conceited Malvolio. On the other hand, he could seize from the inner side by links of vital affinity every form of higher character, passionate, reflective, or executive, lover and prince, duke and captain, legislator and judge, counsellor and king, and portray with almost equal ease and with vivid truthfulness men and women of distant ages, of different races, and widely sundered nationalities.

As in his dramatic world he embraces the widest variety of human experience, so in his personal character he may be said to have combined in harmonious union the widest range of qualities, including some apparently the most opposed. He was a vigilant and acute man of business, of great executive ability, with a power of looking into affairs which included a thorough mastery of tedious legal details. But with all his worldly prudence and foresight he was at the same time the most generous and affectionate of men, honoured and loved by all who knew him, with the irresistible charm that belongs to simplicity and direct

ness of character, combined with thoughtful sympathy and real kindness of heart. And, while displaying unrivalled skill, sagacity, and firmness in business transactions and practical affairs he could promptly throw the whole burden aside, and in the exercise of his noble art pierce with an eagle's wing the very highest heaven of invention. That indeed was his native air, his true home, his permanent sphere, where he still rules with undisputed sway. He occupies a throne apart in the ideal and immortal kingdom of supreme creative art, poetical genius, and dramatic truth.

WHAT SHAKESPEARE LEARNT AT SCHOOL.1

MANY students of Shakespeare on reading the above heading may be disposed to turn away, partly from the feeling expressed by Mr. Ward in his History of English Dramatic Literature, "that the vexed question as to Shakespeare's classical attainments is in reality not worth discussing," and partly from the conviction that whether of special interest or not the subject has been worked out. This feeling is certainly natural, and I must confess to having a good deal of sympathy with it myself. Those who are familiar with the treatment of Shakespeare's scholarship by Whalley and Upton, or even at times in the useful notes of the Variorum edition, may be pardoned for feeling only a languid interest in the question. Upton's cloud of references to Greek and Roman authors has often no real connection with Shakespeare at all: his favourite plan being to make an arbitrary change in the text by substituting some word or phrase, on which he can hang a string of classical quotations. And short of this extreme, the subject was often treated by the last century editors in a somewhat unfruitful and tedious way. The vague verbal coincidences and far-fetched allusions on the strength of which passages were often pronounced parallel, the minute but scrappy and irrelevant learning of the notes and annotations, are enough to inspire distaste of the whole subject. And it would not be

1 Fraser's Magazine, Nov., 1879, Jan. and May, 1880.