him. What was "small" learning
in the eyes of such a scholar as Jonson, may yet have been something
handsome in itself; and his remark may fairly imply that the Poet had
at least the regular free-school education of the time. Honourably
ambitious, as his father seems to have been, of being somebody, it is
not unlikely that he may have prized learning the more for being
himself without it. William was his oldest son; when his tide of
fortune began to ebb, the Poet was in his fourteenth year, and, from
his native qualities of mind, we cannot doubt that, up to that time at
least, "all the learnings that his _town_ could make him the receiver
of he took, as we do air, fast as 'twas ministered, and in his Spring
became a harvest."

The honest but credulous gossip Aubrey, who died about 1700, states,
on the authority of one Beeston, that "Shakespeare understood Latin
pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in
the country." The statement may fairly challenge some respect,
inasmuch as persons of the name of Beeston were connected with the
stage before Shakespeare's death and long afterwards. And it is not
unlikely that the Poet may, at some time, have been an assistant
teacher in the free-school at Stratford. Nor does this conflict with
Rowe's account, which states that John Shakespeare kept William at the
free-school for some time; but that straitness of circumstances and
need of help forced him to withdraw his son from the school. Though
writing from tradition, Rowe was evidently careful, and what he says
agrees perfectly with what later researches have established
respecting John Shakespeare's course of fortune. He also tells us that
the Poet's father "could give him no better education than his own
employment." John Shakespeare, as we have seen, was so far occupied
with agriculture as to be legally styled a "yeoman." Nor am I sure but
the ancient functions of an English yeoman's oldest son might be a
better education for what the Poet afterwards accomplished than was to
be had at any free-school or university in England. His large and apt
use of legal terms and phrases has induced many good Shakespearians
learned in the law to believe that he must have been for some time a
student of that noble science. It is indeed difficult to understand
how he could have spoken as he often does, without some study in the
law; but, as he seems thoroughly at home in the specialties of many
callings, it is possibl