"This

of the virtues and generosity of Sir Hugh: monumental table was erected A.D.1708, at the request of the Corporation (by Sir John Clopton, of Clopton, Knt., their Recorder), in memory of Sir Hugh Clopton, Knt. (a younger branch of yt ancient family), whose pious works were so many and great, they ought to be had in everlasting remembrance, especially by this town and parish, to which he was a particular benefactor, where he gave £100 to poor housekeepers and 100 marks to twenty poor maidens of good name and fame, to be paid at their marriages. He built ye stone bridge over Avon, with ye causey at ye west end; farther manifesting his piety to God, and love to this place of his nativity, as ye centurion in ye Gospel did to ye Jewish Nation and Religion, by building them a Synagogue; for at his sole charge, this beautiful Chappel of ye Holy Trinity was rebuilt, temp H. VII, and ye Cross Ile of ye parish Church. He gave £50 to ye repairing bridges and highways within 10 miles of this town." Then follows a recital of a number of benefactions to London and other parts of the country, closing with the words: "This charatable Gent died a Bachelr 15 Sept. 1496, and was buried in Saint Margaret's Church, Lothbury, London."

In this country Shakespeare's young imagination was unfolded; against this background of tender and pervasive beauty he came to consciousness, not, perhaps, of the quality and range of his genius, but of the nobility of form and loveliness of colour against which the comedy and tragedy of human life are set as upon a divinely ordered stage.

CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE AND LONDON

THERE are traditions but no records of the period between 1577, when Shakespeare's school life ended, and the year 1586, when he left Stratford. In this age, when all events, significant and insignificant, are reported; when biography has assumed proportions which are often out of all relation to the importance or interest of those whose careers are described with microscopic detail; when men of letters, especially, are urged to produce and publish with the greatest rapidity, are photographed, studied, described, and characterized with journalistic energy and industry, and often with journalistic indifference to perspective; and when every paragraph from the pen of a successful writer is guarded from the purloiner and protected from plagiarist by laws and penalties, it seems incredible that so little, relatively, should be known about the daily life, the working relations, the intimate associations, the habits and artistic training, of the greatest of English poets.

And this absence of biographic material on a scale which would seem adequate from the modern point of view has furnished, not the ground-for the word ground implies a certain solidity or basis of fact

but the occasion, of many curious speculations and of some radical scepticism. Absence of the historical sense has often led the rash and uncritical to read into past times the spirit and thought of the present, and to interpret the conditions of an earlier age in the light of existing conditions. Taking into account the habits of Shakespeare's time; the condition of life into which he was born; the fact that he was not a writer of dramas to be read, but of plays to be acted, and that, in his own thought and in the thought of his contemporaries, he was a playwright who lived by writing for the stage and not a poet who appealed to a reading public and was eager for literary reputation; recalling the inferior position which actors occupied in society, and the bohemian atmosphere in which all men who were connected with the stage lived, it is surprising, not that we know so little, but that we know so much, about Shakespeare.

Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has covered this ground with admirable clearness and precision: "In this aspect the great dramatist participates in the fate of most of his literary contemporaries, for if a collection of the known facts relating to all of them were tabularly arranged, it would be found that the number of the ascertained particulars of his life reached at least the average. At the present day, with biography carried to a wasteful and ridiculous excess, and Shakespeare the idol not merely of a nation but of the educated world, it is difficult to realize a period when no interest was taken in the events in the lives of authors, and when the great poet himself, notwithstanding the im

mense popularity of some of his works, was held in no general reverence. It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable. The intelligent appreciation of genius by individuals was not sufficient to neutralize in these matters the effect of public opinion and the animosity of the religious world, — all circumstances thus uniting to banish general interest in the history of persons connected in any way with the stage. This biographical indifference continued for many years, and long before the season arrived for a real curiosity to be taken in the subject, the records from which alone a satisfactory memoir could have been constructed had disappeared. At the time of Shakespeare's decease, non-political correspondence was rarely preserved, elaborate diaries were not the fashion, and no one, excepting in semiapocryphal collections of jests, thought it worth while to record many of the sayings and doings, or to delineate at any length the characters, of actors and dramatists, so that it is generally by the merest accident that particulars of interest respecting them have been recovered."

History, tradition, contemporary judgments scattered through a wide range of books and succeeded by a "Centurie of Prayse," the fruits of the critical. scholarship of the last half-century, the Record in the Stationers' Register taken in connection with the dates of the first representations of the different plays; and, finally, the study of Shakespeare's work as a

whole, have, however, gone a long way toward making good the absence of voluminous biographic material. Enough remains to make the story of the poet's career connected and intelligible, the record of his growth as an artist clear and deeply significant, and the history of his spiritual development legible and of absorbing interest.

The kind of occupation which fell to Shakespeare's hands during the five years of his adolescence between 1577 and 1582 is a matter of minor interest; the education of sense and imagination which he received during that impressionable period is a matter of supreme interest. That he early formed the habit of exact observation his work shows in places innumerable. No detail of natural life escaped him; the plays are not only saturated with the spirit of nature, but they are accurate calendars of natural events and phenomena; they abound in the most exact descriptions of those details of landscape, flora, and animal life which a writer must learn at first hand and which he can learn only when the eye is in the highest degree sensitive and the imagination in the highest degree responsive. A boy of Shakespeare's genius and situation would have mastered almost unconsciously the large and thorough knowledge of trees, flowers, birds, dogs, and horses which his work shows. Such a boy sees, feels, and remembers everything which in any way relates itself to his growing mind. The Warwickshire landscape became, by the unconscious process of living in its heart, a part of his memory, the background of his conscious life. He knew it passively in