If we had a word in our language which expressed the idea of Lines of Knowledge, we should employ it as the title of the Series now proposed, to distinguish the work from a Cyclopædia, or Circle of Knowledge. As it is, we adopt a homely word to express the character of this undertaking- Store of Knowledge.' A Store suggests the notion of Accumulation -of valuable matters brought together from time to time, to be employed when needful. Such an idea was of course present to the mind of him who first used the word Magazine in a literary sense. But that word expresses something different from the object of the present work, which is to publish a Series of Papers, each, for the most part, complete in itself, which, in the quantity of condensed information they may eventually contain, shall form a Library for Reading and Reference. Each contribution to the Store of Knowledge' will, in truth, be a Book; -sold, indeed, at a very small price; but as accurate, as complete, within its limits, and therefore as trustworthy, as books of larger cost. In the same way as he chooses other books, a reader may here select what subject he pleases, should he desire information only on some especial point; and, on the other hand, by a very small weekly or monthly outlay, he may gradually accumulate a library essentially large, although occupying a narrow space. If we should go on to publish, for example, two hundred and fifty papers, the purchaser will in reality possess, for about two pounds, a body of knowledge which we may truly say cannot be obtained in so useful a form in a collection of as many ordinary volumes, at the cost of fifty pounds. When the work has attained a certain completeness, he may classify what has been originally presented to him in a miscellaneous form. No. 1.-Price 2d.

This Store of Knowledge will then become a library, and it will have its departments, as every other library; and to this ultimate arrangement we shall steadily look forward. As it proceeds, he will find abundant variety, but that variety produced not without reference to a principle and an end. The Publishers have the command of a great body of valuable Copyright, which they propose thus to apply; and they have secured the co-operation, either for new contributions or for careful revision, of gentlemen well qualified to conduct such a work. They have determined to produce this series of 'Knowledge for all Readers' at a price which relies upon its being acceptable to many thousands. If they give for Twopence what is equal to a hundred ordinary octavo pages, they must look to such a circulation as the present extended desire for knowledge renders possible. They cannot, however, secure that circulation without adequately meeting the general demand, in the nature of the subjects which it is proposed to treat, and in the manner in which they are treated. Upon the latter point it is unnecessary to make professions. One great security of the reader as to the original value of the information which he receives will be this-that the names of the authors will in most cases be affixed to their papers, and in all cases the sources of the information will be stated. Without offering any formal or complete list of subjects, it may be sufficient here to give a very general outline of the plan.

The information contained in this "Store" will be condensed; but it will not be so condensed that the work shall have little value except for reference. It is not proposed, therefore, to treat historical subjects as if the mere chronology of events was alone

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of facts, but with a particular view towards those practical details, a right knowledge of which, in whatever branch of industry, determines the successful progress of a community, by rendering individual exertion profitable.

1. It is not intended to include in 'The Store of Knowledge' any abstruse Scientific Treatises. The practical applications of SCIENCE will, however, form the subjects of many papers.

2. In HISTORY, no long connected relation of Civil and Military Transactions will be attempted; but striking periods in the progress of mankind, such as the Crusades, the Discovery of America, the Reformation, will be treated of; and the Lives of Men who have exercised a marked influence on the condition of Society, either by their acts or their opinions, such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the great writers of ancient and modern times, will be fully given.

3. In GEOGRAPHY, the great physical features of the Globe, such as Oceans, Seas, Rivers, Mountainranges, will be discussed in such a way as to combine isolated facts, and so lead to general results of direct utility, with the larger divisions of the earth,-and occasionally will be given a fuller description of some country upon which more minute information, from particular circumstances, is required, such as our Indian Empire, China, New Zealand, at the present time.

4. In the exposition of GOVERNMENT and LAW, all politics, in the ordinary sense of the word, will be avoided; but those matters will be explainedwhether having reference to the theory and practice of the Constitution, the Duties of every member of the community as such, and the great principles of the Law, both of persons and property-which are necessary to be known for the proper understanding of a man's social position and that of his fellow-subjects.

5. The RESOURCES OF THE NATION, whether in Agriculture, Manufactures, or Commerce, will be treated not only with regard to the large aggregate

6. In DOMESTIC ECONOMY, whether in Household

tivation of pure and inexpensive sources of enjoyment, the advance of happiness and the improvement of taste will be constantly kept in view.

7. In NATURAL HISTORY, and in Zoology especially, those relations only of the Animal Kingdom to Man will be considered by which the inferior creatures are subdued to his service and rendered subservient to his existence. In other respects, the habits of the living creation will be more particularly regarded in connexion with those instincts which so remarkably exhibit the design of the Creator. In the Mineral and Vegetable Kingdoms, the uses of the great products of the earth will claim more of our attention than their scientific nomenclature and arrangement. It is in connection with the human family that we shall chiefly treat of the riches of Nature. The geographical distribution of plants and animals will demand some distinct notices.

8. In LITERATURE, the Series will not include any republication of Standard Books; but it will occasionally contain an Analysis of some great work, and a full critical Biography of some illustrious Author. Some numbers will also be applied to the object of rendering our finest Poetry familiar, by Specimens and explanatory Notices; and these will form a connected Series, not large in extent, but comprising a great mass of the choicest treasures of our language, under the title of English Anthology.'

The Store of Knowledge' will be printed on super-royal octavo, each Number consisting of 32 columns.

The first Number will appear on Saturday, June 5, 1841; and the first Part on the 1st July., A Volume will be completed Half-Yearly. But, as we have intimated, regard will be had to a more systematic arrangement of subjects, ultimately, than can be nowproposed.

It was in 1802, when our country was threatened with invasion, and the arms of France seemed almost resistless, that a great living poet, Wordsworth, wrote these lines:

"In our halls is hung

Armoury of the invincible knights of old:

We must be free, or die, who speak the tongue That SHAKSPERE spake."

And this was no idle boast. The connexion between England's freedom and the name of England's greatest writer was not an imaginary one. The " armoury that was hung in "our halls" was not the breastplate and the helmet that our fathers wore at Agincourt. The "armoury' "to which the poet alludes was the inheritance of thoughts and feelings which we had derived from the great minds who had gone before us. From him whose name "is the greatest in our literature-it is the greatest in all literature,"t- -we have received such a stock of household thoughts, gradually but surely entering into the national soul during successive generations, that we "who speak the tongue" which he spake "must be free, or die." Nor was it that we were to find in the mass of writings which Shakspere has bequeathed to us any specific exhortations to freedom, any rapturous declamations on our national greatness, any incense to that pride which all nations feel, and would be unworthy of the name of nation if they did not feel. There is much in Shakspere to excite, in

We have placed at the head of this paper the autograph of "WILLM. SHAKSPERE," copied from his undoubted signature in the volume of Montaigne's Essays, by John Florio, which was purchased for a large sum by the Trustees of the British Museum. This autograph has set at rest the long-disputed question of the mode in which the poet wrote his name. Sir Frederic Madden has satisfactorily shown, in a letter published in the Archæologia,' vol. xxvii., that in the five other acknowledged genuine signatures in existence, namely, in the three attached to his will, and the two affixed to deeds connected with the mortgage and sale of a property in Blackfriars, "the poet always wrote his name SHAKSPERE, and, consequently, that those who have inserted an e after the k, or an a in the second syllable, do not write the same (as far as we are able to judge) in the same manner as the poet himself uniformly would authorize us to do." In the Stratford Register, both at his baptism and burial, says Sir F. Madden, the name is spelt Shakspere. We may add that, in the same registers, the entries of the baptism of his three children, and of the burial of his son (which entries were most probably made under his own inspection), are spelt Shakspere. The printers, however, during his life, and in the folio of 1623, spell his name Shakespeare. A furious controversy has been going on for two years upon this subject, which much resembles that of the big-endians and little-endians in Gullivers Travels." We choose to belong to the party who spell the name as the poet wrote it; but we shall not quarrel with those who spell it as his contemporaries printed it.

+ Hallam.

It

cidentally, a just patriotism; but there is very little of what may be called patriotic poetry. There is, however, something better. Freedom, in the highest sense of the word, is the result of a nation's intelligence,-not the intelligence which consists in mere skill in the imitative arts, in accurate knowledge of the abstract sciences, in the applications of mechanical and chemical discovery,-but which is created out of the habit of looking at the entire physical and moral world with more especial reference to man's ultimate capabilities and destinies than to the mere sensual utilities of the things around us. is the great and enduring effect of a high literature such as England possesses, and of which Shakspere is the unquestioned head, to keep alive this nobler intelligence; to diffuse it through every corner of the land; to make its light penetrate into the humblest cottage; to mould even the lisping accents of the child to the utterance of its words. A literature such as this follows in the wake of the higher spiritual instruction,an auxiliary to what we may more emphatically call Wisdom. To estimate the influence of such a writer as Shakspere upon the Intelligence of England would be a vain attempt, because the most powerful effects of that influence are indirect. It is sufficient to say, there has lived amongst us a man who possessed a power, surpassing that of all other men, of delineating almost every possible combination of human character. He has not represented mere abstract qualities, such as a good man and a bad man, a mild and passionate, a humble and a proud; but he has painted men as they are, with mixed qualities and mixed motives, the result of temperament and education; and so painting them he has not only succeeded in kindling and cherishing within us the highest admiration and love of what is noble, and generous, and just, and true, but in making us kind and tolerant towards the errors of our fellow-creatures, compassionate even for their vices. But the same man has never broken down the distinction, as other writers have done, between what is worthy to be loved and imitated, and what to be pitied and shunned. We have no moral monsters in Shakspere, no generous housebreakers, no philanthropic murderers. We see men as they are; but we see them also with a clearness that it would be vain to expect from our own unassisted vision. The same great master of all the secrets of the human heart is also the expounder of the very highest and noblest philosophy. Books of no inconsiderable size have been made out of his mere moral axioms. To those who are familiar with Shakspere's writings there is scarcely a situation of human affairs which will not suggest a recollection of something that may be applied to it for instruction out of what

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he has written. Many of our habitual sayings, that enter into the minds even of the uninstructed as something to which they have become familiar without books, are Shakspere's. If two men of average education converse together for half an hour on general subjects, there can be little doubt that, without actual quotation, the ever genial wit of Shakspere will be found to have given point, and his universal poetry elevation, to their discourse. The mode in which the mind of Shakspere is penetrating through all other lands exhibits the stages in the progress of his universality in our own land. He first becomes the property of the highest and the most educated minds. They have acknowledged his influence at first timidly and suspiciously; but the result is invariable: the greatest intellects become prostrate before this master intellect. Under false systems of criticism, both in our own and in other countries, the merits of Shakspere as a whole have been misunderstood; and he has been held as a violator of certain conventional principles of art, upon which poetry was to be built as churches were built in the same age,-with nothing irregular, nothing projecting, a good solid cube, with one window exactly like another, and a doorway in the middle. The architects of our fine old Gothic cathedrals, and Shakspere, were equally held to be out of the pale of regular art. They were wild and irregular geniuses, more to be wondered at than imitated. But, with all this, there never was a period, however low its standard of taste, when many a votary did not feel a breathless awe as he entered such cathedrals as York and Lincoln, and had his devotion raised and refined by the matchless beauty and sublimity of the temple in which he prayed. And, in the same way, there never was a period since Shakspere's plays were first acted in a mean theatre, without scenery or decoration,-up to the present time when they are the common possession of Europe, and are known amongst millions of men who inhabit mighty continents and islands where the English tongue was almost or wholly unspoken when he lived,-there never was a period when the love and reverence which England now bears him were not most ardently cherished in the hearts of the best and the most influential of the people-those who thought for themselves. Even those who scoffed at his art never doubted his power. They would criticise him,-they would attempt to mend him, --but he was always "the incomparable." They held, too, that he was unlearned; but they also held that he knew everything without learning. Nature did for him, they said, what study did for other men. Thus they endeavoured to raise him in the mass, and degrade him in the detail; and by dint of their absurd general admiration, and their equally absurd depreciation of minute parts of his writings, they laboured to propagate an opinion which would have been fatal to one less really great, that he was a person, not exactly inspired, but producing higher efforts of imagination, and displaying the most varied and accurate knowledge, without the education and the labour by which very inferior productions of literature were ordinarily produced. These were the critics of our own country, from the days of the Restoration almost up to the end of the reign of George III. But, in the mean while, after the hateful taste was put down that we imported from France with all the vices of the court of Charles II., Shakspere again became the unquestionably best property of the English stage. There never was a period in which he was not diligently read. Four folio editions of his works were printed in 62 years-1623 to 1685, a time most unfavourable to literature. It is in this way-by the multitude of readers—that Spakspere has become universal. If books were now to perish, if "letters should not be known," the influence of Shakspere could not be eradicated from amongst those who speak his tongue the moral and intellectual influence would remain after the works which had produced it had perished. But they could not perish wholly some fragments of the knowledge of which he is full,-some consecutive words of the exquisite diction in which he abounds,- -some dim abbreviation of the wonderful characters with which he has peopled the earth,would start up in remote places, as the flowers of past centuries

again make their appearance when the forests of more recent times have been swept away. This is a consummation which cannot happen. Shakspere, through the invention of printing, is, in the limited use of the word, eternal.

It has been considered a proper opening of a work which desires to make the great body of the people familiar with sound and abiding knowledge to devote the first number, or rather two numbers, to a view of the life, in connexion with the writings, of him to whom was given this praise,-and to him alone it could be justly given,—

"He was not of an age, but for all time."

One of the editors of Shakspere,--and he that possessed the greatest shrewdness, mixed with the most unreasonable portion of prejudice and unfairness,--Steevens--says, " All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspere is-that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon-married and had children there went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." This is not true. The life of the most distinguished modern statesman, whose course may be traced by document upon document, might be despatched in a similar antithetical summary. This is not "all that is known with any degree of certainty.' There is, indeed, a lamentable deficiency in the materials for Shakspere's life, such as perhaps exists in no similar instance of a man so eminent amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Hallam has justly observed, "All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have detected about Shakspere serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name, that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, can be produced." And yet the register of their births, of their marriages, of the children born to them, of their deaths, and to which in many cases we may add the record of their wills, are the only traces which are left, after the lapse of two centuries and a half, of the greater number of those who have dwelt upon the same earth and in the same country with ourselves. But if there were a proportionate motive in the character of any man to connect such meagre records with the time and circumstances in which he lived, it would not be an unworthy task to attempt to shadow out his life by the help of these imperfect traces of his career. Such is the task which antiquaries are constantly proposing to themselves with regard to men in whom the world takes very little interest. There is, perhaps, no man whose life would not be interesting could we know, and know truly, all the circumstances of it. If we have to follow the course of a very distinguished man, the interest of the subject may compensate for the paucity of the facts. If we have nothing but registers, and title-deeds, and pedigrees, and wills, we must be content with these "spoils of time," in the absence of matters which bring us nearer to the individual. We have, however, as we have said, to group these records, amidst the mass of circumstances of which they form so small a part. A writer of the present day, who has given an impulse to our abstract thinking, which like all other such impulses may eventually be traced onward to practical results-Mr. Carlyle-in a review of a popular edition of a biographical work, says, "Along with that tombstone information, perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked to gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question: What and how was English Life in time? wherein has ours grown to differ therefrom? In other words: What things have we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before we, from such distance, can put ourselves in

-'s place; and so, in the full sense of the term, understand him, his sayings and his doings?" If we fill up the blank with the name of Shakspere, we have a very clear exposition of the spirit in which it appears to us that the Life of Shakspere ought to be written. We have the "tombstone information,"