rushed the
bluffing, busy Burbage.

The constant circulation of bohemian customers, day and night about the
Devil's Tavern, was not conducive to careful composition of plays, and
William and myself moved to modest quarters near Paris Garden, kept by a
Miss Maggie Mellow, a blonde maiden of uncertain age.

William continued to perform his theatrical duties diligently, while I was
engaged at the printing shop of Field, translating historic, dramatic and
poetic works from Latin authors, thus piecing out the price of food,
clothes and shelter in the whirlpool of London joy and misery.

During my apprenticeship with Sam Granite, as a marble cutter, I spent my
nights with Master Hunt studying the intricate windings of the Latin
language, and became proficient in the translation of ancient authors,
delving also into the philosophy of Greek roots, with its Attic phrases and
Athenian eloquence.

My parents desired me to leave off the trade of stone cutting and prepare
for the priesthood, where I could make an easier living, working on the
fears, egotism and hopes of mankind.

I was always too blunt to play the velvet philosopher and saint-like
character of a sacerdotal vicaro of any church or creed, feeling full well
that the so-called divine teacher and pupil know just as much about the
"hereafter" as I do--and that's nothing! Put not thy faith in wind,
variable and inconstant.

So, a life of bohemian hack-work for printers, publishers and theatrical
managers seemed best suited to my nature, giving me perfect freedom of
thought and a disposition to express my honest opinion to prince or
peasant, in home, church or state.

God is God, and Nature is His representative!

_While man, vain creature of an hour,
Depressed by grief or blessed by power
Is but a shadow and a name--
A flash of evanescent fame!_

Most of the dramatic writers during the reigns of Henry the Eighth,
Elizabeth, James the First, and Charles the Second, were graduates of
Oxford, Cambridge or other classical halls of learning. They borrowed their
plots and characters from ancient history and endeavored to galvanize them
into English subjects, tickling the ears of the groundlings, as well as
their royal patrons with Grecian and Roman translations of lofty
allegorical and mythological conceptions.

AEschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Homer, with Terence, Tacitus, Virgil,
Horace and Ovid, were constantly pillaged for thoughts to piece ou