"Well could he ride, and often men would say His knowledge of horseflesh would make a fortune at Tattersal's; and he gives a summary of the points of a horse worthy of Rarey. "Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, All this shows the intense nationality of Shakespearethe strong leaven of English feeling, habits, and tastes by which he was animated, and which make him the impersonation of our national character. We shall see him manifest the same spirit in every relation and at every stage of life. But his fondness for animals, and his scrutiny of their peculiarities, were quickened by his love of nature. He did not observe them merely as a sportsman, but as a student. They were to him as the flowers, as the trees, as the everlasting hills-words in the great volume ever open before him, the Book of Life. They were lessons in a boundless, unfathomable philosophy, such as schools could not teach. Since he was master of small Latin and less Greek, men ask where he acquired his wondrous knowledge, that knowledge which comprehends everything-which is more than all the learning of the Egyptians. We need not inquire when he so explicitly tells us-when he says that he foundTongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 2 66 That was the burden of the sermons—of all that he observed and learnt: good in everything! Not that he was timist, beset with one idea, but that he looke 1 A Lover's Complaint.' 2 As You Like It,' act ii. 1. everything in its relation to the whole. His far-seeing wisdom ranged beyond the immediate effect, and saw the comprehensive scheme to which it was tributary, and which had no flaw. The wise King of Navarre looked at nature through his own crude notions, drawn from the inventions of Ptolemy, and believed that he could frame a better system, but Shakespeare, with only the same light to guide him, searched deeper and further, and recognized the handiwork of Omniscience. Thus it softened his heart, expanded his mind, elevated his soul. There was not an object-down, as he says, to the very stones, from which he did not gather instruction. His faculties were always in exercise. Nature was to him like a scroll in cipher, and he studied it till he found the key. Then he unlocked her deepest, darkest secrets. There was neither speech nor language, but her voice was heard in his breast. Linnæus could not speak so glibly of our English herbs and flowers, though the poet's Latin happily did not serve to give them unintelligible names. We like them better as "Hot lavender, mint, savory, marjoram." 1 And so through the list. Shakespeare, if little in Latin, was less, we are told, in Greek, but he had the genius of the old Greek sages, grappling with the unknown like Socrates, and solving the problems of the material world like Pythagoras and Plato. He observed the falling apple before Newton. The strong base and building of my love To him the minutest effect shadowed a mighty end, which was being worked out by the ministry of an over-ruling 'Winter's Tale,' act iv. 3. Providence. The dust that crumbled into the stream, as he strayed along its banks, plumbed for him the depths of creation, disclosing the slow but certain process by which it shall be folded up as a vesture and be changed. Thus he was the prophet of geology before it found an expounder in Werner. "O, God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times: Make mountains level, and the continent- Into the sea; and, other times, to see The beachy girdle of the ocean This is the old Greek leaven; the same intuition, the same grasp of universal knowledge. The one touch of nature makes Shakespeare and Aristotle kin; and, as the Stagyrite was the first to dissect the human body, Shakespeare unfolded the mechanism of the soul, probed the breast of life, and showed its range of suffering, from the pang of the crushed insect, great as when a giant dies, to the agonies of Ophelia's heart and the paroxysms of Hamlet's brain. Such were the lessons and the instinctive acquirements of Shakespeare's youth. It were idle to conjecture what he read or where he procured books. We only know that he did not, like Benedick, draw his wit from the 'Hundred Merry Tales.' It came rather from "Nature's infinite book of secresy," not only its pictured page, the great and beautiful and sublime, but, what might be thought small and mean, its most familiar lines. He did "reverence" to the "sun's uprising," but he drew light also from "the fiery glowworm's eyes."5 These taught humility as well as 1 King Henry IV., Part II.,' act iii. 1. 2 Much Ado about Nothing,' act ii. 1. wisdom; and he found that the widest human study and observation will, after all, leave worlds unnoted. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."1 More indeed! He might see an example in himself, growing up in the kennel, with a consciousness of superior powers, and with his sharp trial of humiliation and sorrow, not dreamt of in any one's philosophy. It was enough to teach him humility, to have a perception of all things, and find that he was nothing. "All is darkness," said Galileo in his dungeon, "yet it still goes round." The world did not stop on its course because its oracle was in chains. There was marriage and giving of marriage in Stratford, though Shakespeare was in eclipse. John Shakespeare continued to be dogged by misfortune, and it drew him down deeper and deeper, for he was now visited with domestic affliction. In 1579 he lost his daughter Ann just as she attained her eighth year, an age which endeared her to her brother as much as her parents. We may still acknowledge a solemnity in the bereavement which first brought our poet and the King of Terrors face to face. This was a scene to awaken in him, even at the age of sixteen, some flashes of that perception with which he seems almost to light up death, as if he showed us the immortality of the soul through the grave-clothes, transfigured by its own thoughts. Imagination sees him join the sad group at the bedside of his little sister. The younger ones around, his pretty favourite Joan, the bent form of his father, and his mother with her pale face and streaming eyes-all receive a loving glance. Perhaps he turns an inquiring look on Falstaff's "wise woman," who officiated at his sister's birth, and now sadly watches her last moments, 1 Hamlet,' act i. 5. 2 King Henry IV.' 66 as a wise woman attended those of Queen Mary.' She can give no hope, and he waits by the bed while the child passes softly away— "If thou and nature can so gently part, The stroke of Death is as a lover's pinch, Nor is he absent at the almost sadder moment when the lid of the narrow house is to close like a door between the dead and living, and all gather for a last look "Death sits on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flow'r of all the field." 3 It is contended that John Shakespeare could not be in poverty at this time, because he incurred the expense of hiring a pall and having the bell toll at the funeral. The parochial register shows, indeed, that on the 4th of April, the day of the interment, he paid eightpence for this last tribute to his child. But there is far from being reason to suppose that he was now in funds, for on the 11th of the previous month he was returned as a defaulter for three and fourpence in an assessment for the local contribution of arms for national defence. At the same time, we must remember that he was still an alderman, and therefore likely to make efforts to keep up an appearance. be smuggled to the grave like a maimed rites. She must be borne his neighbours, with all observance. Some sacrifice would be made to accomplish such an object, and, though shaken in credit and much reduced in means, John Shakespeare yet commanded resources. These, indeed, were now to undergo a severe strain, and the consequent arrangements opened new experiences to SHAKESPEARE THE APPRENTICE. His daughter could not pauper, with Ophelia's thither in the sight of 1 Strickland's 'Queens of England.' 2 Antony and Cleopatra,' act v. 2. |