[187] Did he not make
his fortune where most of his rivals failed? If he was "obscure," how
otherwise could he have been less so? How could the bankrupt tradesman's
son otherwise rise to fame? Should he have sought, at all costs, to
become a lawyer, and rise perchance to the seat of Bacon, and the
opportunity of eking out his stipend by bribes? If it be conceded that
he must needs try literature, and such literature as a man could live
by; and if it be further conceded that his plays, being so marvellous in
their content, were well worth the writing, where enters the "profanity"
of having written them, or of having acted in them, "for the public
amusement"? Even wise men seem to run special risks when they discourse
on Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own anomaly.

It is indeed fair to say that Shakspere must have drunk a bitter cup in
his life as an actor. It is true that that calling is apt to be more
humiliating than another to a man's self-respect, if his judgment remain
sane and sensitive. We have the expression of it all in the
Sonnets:[188]

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
_Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear_,
_Made old offences of affections new_."

It is impossible to put into fewer and fuller words the story, many a
year long, of sordid compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn its
own inner life into matter for the stage. But he who can read Shakspere
might be expected to divine that it needed, among other things, even
some such discipline as that to give his spirit its strange universality
of outlook. And he who could esteem both Shakspere and Montaigne might
have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of
the final retirement, the dramatic caterer finally winning, out of his
earnings, the peace and self-possession that the essayist had inherited
without toil. He must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Montaigne's
very words[189]: "My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously,
what remains to me of life; there is nothing for which I am minded to
make a strain: not knowledge, of whatever great price it be." And when
he at length took himself away to the quiet village of his birth, it
could hardly be that he had not in mind those words of the essay[190] on
SOLITUDE:

"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether
ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish