sean
strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back
from desuetude at any cost."

Here, then, is an epoch of history, prosperous, high-spirited, tolerant,
enterprising, joyous, alert for knowledge, enamoured of high fancies and
imagination. Here also is a language of ample scope and noble powers.
And into the midst of a London like this there comes up from Stratford,
we know not how, a man marvellously dowered with all those supreme gifts
which I have endeavoured to describe.

Towards the making of Shakespeare, Nature has contributed her utmost.
For the full encouragement of his genius the environment is most apt. It
remains briefly to see what experience did for him, or what he did for
himself. What was his preparation?

His origin was lowly, and, as with Robert Burns, we may be glad of it.
He thus saw intimately certain sides of life and conditions of men which
otherwise he might never have touched so closely. He learned to know all
their strange and naive humours, their ignorance and muddlement. From
them he realised those strong and elemental passions which finer folk
attenuate or disguise. He acquired a stock of sinewy and home-coming
Saxon phrase, which often stood him in good stead, and which forms no
small factor in his vast eloquence. He is manifestly a man who forgot
nothing. In after days he mingled with wits and players, with poets and
peers, but, while ever acquiring diction of wider range and choicer
degree, he kept always ready to hand the language of peasant and clown.
No man ever enjoyed more full instruction in the speech, the thoughts,
or the manners, of all degrees of men.

Of women toward the social summits he perhaps never knew so much, but he
had not studied their humbler sisters in vain, and beneath all the width
of ruff and opulence of silk, he knew well enough what primal feelings
lurked, what affections, what jealousies, what caprices of the eternal
feminine. As for the mere externals of their behaviour, he had abundant
opportunities of noting them.

When modern readers censure Shakespeare for dubious things which he
makes his gentlewomen say and do, they are apt to forget how surprising
were the canons of behaviour and decorum for gentlewomen under good
Queen Bess. For my part I am prepared in all such cases to give their
keen-eyed and marvellous contemporary the benefit of the doubt. He would
not represent ladies as any coarser than they were.

Of his educati