review--however imperfectly--what went to his
making, what elements of gift and character, circumstance, training and
experience were so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say:
"This is a man." This is not the same idle performance as to descant
rapturously upon his purely inborn genius. It is no purpose of mine to
attempt a definition or dissection of genius. It is only in our youth or
ignorance that we possess the confidence to define such abstractions as
beauty, goodness, genius, and art. Still less do I propound a recipe for
its manufacture. If I knew the secret of its attainment I should first
try it upon myself.

Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right
environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in
that order.

Genius, like every other good gift and every perfect gift, "is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence
when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that
it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a
divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to
which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains."

Brains have been classified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As
you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by
thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the
one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built
before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air.
By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and
beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly,
foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's
brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those
storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonishing degree. They were also
full of windows.

His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a
manifoldness, or rather, totality of them. In a different branch of
art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses,
paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and
mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men.

If we analyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her
"darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he
not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays eac