are, I know, people who find it difficult to associate such thrift with the highest poetical genius, and get a kind of shock at knowing that Shakespeare prosecuted a townsman for a debt of one pound ten shillings' worth of malt while he was writing Macbeth. But nothing can be more certain, I think, than that the genius of the man William Shakespeare had a foundation of solid common sense and business sagacity.

One other thing notice. However long his stay in London, however many the attractions and distractions of life there, he always considered Stratford-on-Avon his home and always intended to return there. The earliest plays, like Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, are full of reminiscences of Stratford. In the Midsummer Night, indeed, you may say there is nothing else; and the latest plays, especially The Winter's Tale, if I read it aright, are full of the deep and quiet satisfaction of return to early life and early love. There is no evidence, then, that Shakespeare had forsaken or forgotten his wife and children at home. With what was probably the first considerable sum of money he could save he bought for them in 1597 a goodly house in Stratford, and the following years proceeded to put it in repair and plant an orchard about it. For the next twelve years he would seem to have spent annually in New Place and in the purchase or lease of real estate in the vicinity, sums equivalent to nearly four thousand dollars a year. He was not indifferent to outward tokens of rank, and as early as 1599 succeeded in obtaining the grant to bear a coat of arms, for which his father had applied unsuccessfully. When he came back to Stratford about 1610, he was probably in wealth and social consideration the most important person in his native village.

Now I wish to put beside these facts, which may seem to indicate a nature unattractively mundane and practical, the only two recorded comments made upon Shakespeare's nature by eye-witnesses during those London years. publisher named Chettle says he is sorry for having printed

A

some months before depreciatory remarks with reference to Shakespeare's works, because he has himself since come to know him personally and seen his demeanor, "no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes." Besides, he adds, other people have reported "his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty." Honesty, you know, meant more then than at present. It meant honor, courtesy. And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, declared, "I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side. idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." And in Jonson's lines on the folio portrait he says, you remember,

This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut.

That epithet "gentle" seems to have been often applied to Shakespeare in later years. Doubtless it has a wide and vague meaning, but it always implies at least something of courtesy and affability. Men never spoke of gentle Marlowe, or even, I should say, of gentle John Milton. Such testimonies, meager as they are, certainly give us some hints of the temperament which one thinks made friends for Shakespeare in those London years among all sorts of people, from the brilliant young Earl of Southampton to the plain Huguenot "tire-maker," Mountjoy, in whose house he lived.

And now this picture of the man Shakespeare that we form from the meager facts of his life is confirmed, I believe, by the inferences we draw from the dramas. In the first place the range and variety of the persons in those dramas is proof of the openness and geniality of Shakespeare's temper as a man. How did he come to create so many different men and women,-some seven hundred of them? I say create; but strictly speaking the imagination never does create. It only expands, transforms, and combines the elements of experience into new wholes. Shakespeare in some sense must have known something of all those people, and he could not have known them if he had

not been a companionable man who liked people and was liked by them. Your great dramatist can never be a lofty, isolated man like Milton, or a visionary idealist like Shelley, or a misanthrope like Swift, or a philosopher like Coleridge, or a retired and solitary thinker like Wordsworth. These men may know something of what they call human nature, as they learn it by introspection and reflection, but they do not know men and women, they do not know life. They have each only a narrow circle of friends. But for Shakespeare the world was full of interesting folk. Of narrative invention he had comparatively little; the plots of his plays, as everybody knows, are all borrowed, and sometimes not very well borrowed, put together in hasty, impossible fashion. But the characters are always vital-real men and women. You feel sure that Shakespeare has known them. He was not, I suppose, a reader of many books; Holinshed's Chronicles for English history, and Plutarch's Lives for the classical world seem to have sufficed him. But the characters whom he found in books lived in his imagination as really as those that had entered there through his marvelous observation.

Indeed, observation is hardly the word to describe the method of Shakespeare's acquaintance with men and things. It implies too passive a relation. His observation proper was indeed marvelously exact, his eye marvelously acute. He saw common things, for example, as you and I do not. Do you know what is the most characteristic thing about a violet? That it is modest or humble? Anybody knows that. That it is blue? Thousands of flowers are blue,though, if Shakespeare wished to mention its color he would be likely to specify in some poetic way the shade of blue, as of the pale wood violet, of which he says it is sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes. But Shakespeare noticed that the most characteristic thing about a violet is that it has a habit of gently nodding on its stem,

Or, again,

Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows.

As gentle

As zephyrs blowing below the violet,

Not wagging his sweet head.

Did you ever notice that? Do you know just how many spots there are in the bottom of a cowslip? Shakespeare did:

On her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip.

Scores of examples of this nicety of vision might be cited if I were talking of Shakespeare's poetry, but what I am now insisting is that his larger observation of men and things was always active. It not only sees, it interprets what he sees. Shakespeare's temperament, we feel sure, was always alert and eager. He lived with men, he knew men, was spontaneously interested in and sympathized with them.

Consider his humor, for a man's humor is generally a pretty good test of his attitude towards his fellow men and his enjoyment of life. What a genial and kindly humor it is. He does not care much for loud and empty mirth; there is not in his plays much of that laughter that is like the crackling of thorns under a pot. His best comedies, like As You Like It, seem an expression of the full, healthy joyousness of living. But while his humor of course usually plays about some of the manifold contrasts and inconsistencies of this varied life of ours, his humorous people are never mere eccentrics or freaks; they all belong to our family. We must own them as men and brothers. There are in the company, for example, a good many of those people whom we, when we see them in real life, are apt to classify complacently as stupid people,-Mrs. Quickly, Dogberry, Verges, Bardolph, Shallow, Slender, and all the rest. Yet Shakespeare never assumes any air of superiority to them. He vastly enjoys their company, and, what is more to the point, you are sure they enjoyed his. Often his humor is so touched with kindly human sympathy that it

seems to shade imperceptibly into pathos. You remember old Justice Shallow's reminiscences with Cousin Silence, "Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of my old acquaintances are dead!" "We shall all follow," says Silence. "Certain, 'tis certain; very sure, very sure. Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?" And everybody remembers Mrs. Quickly's account of the last moments of Jack Falstaff. “After I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields."

Not that Shakespeare's humor never has a satiric quality, but he generally reserves his satire for those people who are somehow hollow, who assume an inflated dignity or bigness,-Bottom, old Polonius, Malvolio, ancient Pistol, and their like. These people he laughs at, rather than laughs with. What Carlyle somewhere calls "pretentious ineptitude," was evidently very amusing to Shakespeare, but also somewhat annoying. Yet even here his humor is not bitter or cynical. The generally cynical temper seemed a tragic thing to Shakespeare, as you can see in his Timon, a thing to be pitied or feared.

Are there then no types of character that this man really hated? Well, not many; the man who really knows men and women as Shakespeare did, will find something to touch his sympathy in almost every life. "Hate that man," said Charles Lamb once, "how could I hate him? Don't I know him?" Yet there were men whom Shakespeare I think regarded with unmixed aversion, almost hatred. Who is the worst man in Shakespeare's world? Everybody will say without much hesitation, Iago. Why? Because Iago is the embodiment of absolute selfishness. Envy and the love of personal power make him blind to innocence and contemptuous of virtue. A hard, deceitful, scheming, merciless man. Goneril and Regan, in Lear, belong to the same class. Now a nature like Shakespeare's,