ion. It is true that many
books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a
professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing,
hunting and hawking, horsemanship, politics, and other fields; but such
works are usually the products of enthusiasts in single subjects, who
are apt to forget how much a man of acute mind and keen observation can
pick up of a technical matter that interests him for the time, and how
intelligently he can use it. The cross-examination of an expert witness
by an able lawyer is an everyday illustration; and in the literature of
our own day this kind of versatility is strikingly exemplified in the
work of such a writer as Mr. Kipling.

[Page Heading: School-Books]

How Shakespeare learned to read and write his own tongue we do not know;
that he did learn hardly needs to be argued. The free grammar school at
Stratford-on-Avon, like other schools of its type, was named from its
function of teaching Latin grammar; and we may make what is known of the
curricula of such schools in the sixteenth century the basis for our
inferences as to what Shakespeare learned there.

The accidence, with which the course began, was studied in Lily's
Grammar, and clear echoes of this well-known work are heard in the
conversation between Sir Hugh Evans and William Page in _The Merry Wives
of Windsor_, IV. i, in _1 Henry IV_, II. i. 104, in _Much Ado_, IV. i.
22, in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii. 82 (and perhaps, V. i. 10 and
84), in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 2, in _The Taming of the Shrew_, I. i.
167,--a line of Terence altered by Lily,--and in _Titus Andronicus_, IV.
ii. 20-23, where Demetrius reads two lines from Horace, and Chiron says,

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes
and Nathaniel in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably
due to some elementary phrase-book no longer to be identified. It is to
be noted how prominently this early comedy figures in the list of
evidences of his school-day memories.

Among the first pieces of connected Latin prose read in the Elizabethan
schools was _AEsop's Fables_, a collection which, after centuries of
rewriting and re-compiling for adults, had come in the sixteenth century
to be regarded chiefly as a school-book, but allusions to which are
everywhere to be found in the literature of the day. In _2 Henr