fell short, and were obliged to borrow twenty pounds of my Lord
Southampton to pay our actors. Something must be done. We look into our
old books and endeavor to find a plot out of ancient story, in the same
manner that Sir Hugh Evans would hunt for a text for a sermon. At length
one occurs that pleases our fancy; we revolve it over and over in our
mind,--and at last, after some days' thought, elaborate from it the plot
of a play,--"TIMON OF ATHENS,"--which plot we make a memorandum of,
lest we should forget it. Meantime, we are busy at the theatre with
rehearsals, changes of performance, bill-printing, and a hundred
thousand similar matters that must be each day disposed of. But we keep
our newly-thought-of play in mind at odd intervals, good things occur to
us as we are walking in the street, and we begin to long to be at it.
The opening scenes we have quite clearly in our eye, and we almost know
the whole; or it may be, _vice versa_, that we work out the last scenes
first; at all events, we have them hewn out in the rough, so that we
work the first with an intention of making them conform to a something
which is to succeed; and we are so sure of our course that we have no
dread of the something after,--nothing to puzzle the will, or make us
think too precisely on the event. Such is the condition of mind in which
we finally begin our labor. Some Wednesday afternoon in a holiday-week,
when the theatres are closed, we find ourselves sitting at a desk before
a sea-coal fire in a quaintly panelled rush-strewn chamber, the pen in
our hand, nibbed with a "Rogers's" pen-knife, [A] and the blank page
beneath it.

[Footnote A: "A Shefeld thwitel bare he in his hose."--CHAUCER. _The
Reve's Tale._]

We desire the reader to close his eyes for a moment and endeavor to
fancy himself in the position of William Shakspeare about to write a
piece,--the play abovenamed. This may be attempted without presumption.
We wish to recall and make real the fact that our idol was a man,
subject to the usual circumstances of men living in his time, and to
those which affect all men at all times,--that he had the same round of
day and night to pass through, the same common household accidents which
render "no man a hero to his valet." The world was as real to him as it
is to us. The dreamy past, of two hundred and fifty years since, was to
him the present of one of the most stirring periods in history, when
wonders were born quite as frequently a