with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.

Or--

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,

and so on.

Here, as in the dramas, are no mechanical tricks, no obvious compassing
of sickly sweetnesses. The accent falls where it should, unstrained. The
disguised alliteration comes, as almost always in Milton also, not from
set and conscious purpose, but from the promptings of a mind vibrating
with harmonious suggestion.

This catalogue of virtues has been long, but it has required some
self-command to prevent it from being longer. It justifies the
exclamation with which Mr. Sidney Lee closes his life of Shakespeare, an
exclamation which he deftly borrows from Hamlet: "How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a God!"

So much for Nature's making. With such lavish powers, or at least
potentialities, was Shakespeare born. It is appalling to reflect that
their fruit might all have been lost to the world if John Shakespeare,
the father, had been but a little poorer than he actually was; if
William, the son, had been sent to the plough-tail without the
rudiments of education, and so had been banished for ever from contact
with bright spirits and all the brilliant motley of London life. His
fate would have been that of Gray's rural "mute inglorious Milton" and
the headstone with "Here lies William Shakespeare" would have meant
nothing outside the parish, and very little inside it. It is an alarming
thought also that, had he been born half a century later, though with
every educational advantage, his manhood would have fallen under the
grim Puritan tyranny, and he would never have written a play. It is a
peculiarly happy combination of circumstances which we must thank for
the making of Shakespeare as he is.

Nature produced the wonderful plant, but, for its perfect development, a
plant requires a congenial soil and atmosphere; it needs light and
water; it needs protection from early destruction, or stunting, or
starvation. It may seem heterodox, but I would maintain stubbornly,
against all the phalanx of Baconians and Bedlamites, that, for the
cultivation of Shakespeare's peculiar genius, circumstances were almost
wholly propitious. His very poverty was his stimulus. Even that school
education of his, which is made by misunde