easy
and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the moment he
got to London. And according to the surmisers, that is what he did.
Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to teach him these
things, and no library in the little village to dig them out of. His
father could not read, and even the surmisers surmise that he did not
keep a library.

It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast
knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the
manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the
_clerk of a Stratford court_; just as a bright lad like me, reared in a
village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in
knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the
veteran exercisers of that adventure-bristling trade through catching
catfish with a "trot-line" Sundays. But the surmise is damaged by the
fact that there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young
Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law court.

It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his
law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through
"amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up
lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts and
listening. But it is only surmise; there is no _evidence_ that he ever
did either of those things. They are merely a couple of chunks of
plaster of paris.

There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in
front of the London theatres, mornings and afternoons. Maybe he did. If
he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his
recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great
plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend
ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's
difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an
erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk every
day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next
day's imperishable drama.

He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of
soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a
knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily
emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his
dramas. How did he acquire these rich