know that Shakespeare was a brilliant, a mighty, poetic genius, and that likewise were innate in him an unsurpassed dramatic genius and dramatic talent. With what appetite, then, with what intentness, must his young eyes and ears have looked and listened to the symbolic pageants, the swelling dialogues, of the stage; and in what a prolific glow must have been laid upon his great, growing faculties flake upon flake of radiant visions and ardent conceptions, to be in after years shaped, distended, purified, magnified, into the most earnest and beautiful of artistic revelations !

From preserved records it is discovered that, during Shakespeare's youth, scarcely a year passed without some theatrical entertainment being offered to the inhabitants of Stratford. And it is a curious fact that 1569, the year in which a company was for the first time allowed to exhibit in the town hall, was the year in which John Shakespeare was bailiff, or chief magistrate. Halliwell, in his valuable Life of Shakespeare, infers from the municipal records that John Shakespeare was probably an especial patron of the stage. William, in 1569, was in his sixth year.

Theatrical shows and performances are to

boys as exciting as the Arabian Nights. In their presentations there is a mystery, a grandeur, a pretension, that fill the young imagination with seductive visions. What must they then have been to the boy who was born to elevate their grandeurs, to deepen their mysteries, to surpass their most astounding wonders? We may be sure that he never missed one of the many Stratford exhibitions. As he grew older he would be irresistibly drawn into personal acquaintance with the players, several of whom were from the town. of Stratford. What more natural than that, when he felt in his brain some of the ambition of manhood, he should try his young hand on dramatic scenes! This, however, may not have been until he had got assurance of his poet gift by producing Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, conjectured, with great probability, to have been written about in his twenty-first year.

And what more natural than that, witnessing the prosperity of Burbage and others of his townsmen, urged by the innate dramatic. and histrionic gifts throbbing dimly within him, depressed by the impoverishment of his father, pressed by the dreary outlook round

the hearth of his young family, this vigorous young genius should, at the age of twenty-two or three, have joined a theatrical company! Prepossessing he must have been, and handsome we have proof that he was, from his portraits, both strong recommendations in the actor's profession. Knowing what powers lay dormant in him, how affable he was, we cannot doubt there was a magnetism in this youthful man that would draw to him the affections of his theatrical companions. They would readily admit him to their company; and once admitted, he would soon win them by his modest superiority in looks and manners, as in practical ability. Here I do not use the language of conjecture. He who carried in him such abounding sources of feeling and intellect, illumined by rarest poetic sensibility, must have been all this, and more. A creature preeminently endowed with sensibility and intellect, in the glowing circle of whose manifold gifts there was no chasm, no breach, could not but be captivating, attaching. The orbicular completeness of his superb faculties would insure gracefulness, together with sympathy of bearing.

The records of Stratford show that in the

year 1587 several theatrical companies performed in the town, among them one designated as the Queen's Players. To this company, afterwards styled the Lord Chamberlain's, Shakespeare belonged in 1589, as is proved by a petition in that year to the Privy Council. In this document are inserted the names of sixteen players, "all of them sharers in the blake Fryers playhouse;" and among the sixteen is the name of William Shakespeare. As 1586 is the earliest date assigned for his migration to London, this important document exhibits young Shakespeare as rising rapidly. He had become in two or three years a copartner in the principal theatre of London, at the age of twenty-six. At first his vocation was that of actor. And he was a good actor; but acting was in his case, as with several of his contemporaries, but initiatory discipline for the higher vocation of dramatist. Immediately on joining the company, he no doubt gave proof of skill as a playwright. Among his partners were several who wrote or adapted plays. It was a dramatic age.

Let us now go back to Stratford and 1582. Some years before he went to London, and towards the end of November, 1582, Shake

speare, in his nineteenth year, married Anne Hathaway, a maiden of twenty-six, daughter of a yeoman in the neighborhood of Stratford. Save that she has the unparalleled distinction of being the wife of Shakespeare, we know nothing of Anne Hathaway, but what is told by a few dry public records. The disparity in years, on the wrong side, provokes curiosity. Shakespeare, with his warm temperament, was just the youth to be fascinated by the charms of a mature woman. What those charms were we have no means of even guessing. They may have been psychical rather than physical; they may have been both. One would fain believe that Shakespeare's first love was a richly endowed woman, a model of beauty and duty. But from what is known of the loves of poets, we are not justified in so concluding. Love seems intended by nature to be a blinder: a device, probably, of the god Hymen to promote marriage. For the performance of its incalculable function this predominating impulse takes from those under its sway the power of seeing things as they are. The marriage of William and Anne appears to have been attended with some haste and secrecy. As in that region betrothment was customary,