with their subtle and imperious command
of language, stately and splendid imagery, careless opulence of
incident, learning, and illustration, wit, wisdom, humor, and
philosophy, insight into the complex abysses of human passion,
familiarity with the secret motives of human conduct, and profound
meditation upon the most sombre problems of human destiny, mark the
highest elevation yet reached by the human mind.

No edition of the plays was collected during Shakespeare's lifetime,
nor until seven years after his death. His heirs and executors made no
claim to supervision nor ownership. He took no apparent interest in
them, nor corrected, nor revised them for publication. He left no
indication by which the genuine could be discerned from the spurious,
and was apparently indifferent to literary reputation. Unlike many of
his great contemporaries in that luminous epoch, there was little of
the Bohemian in Shakespeare. He attended strictly to business, and
grew in prosperity as he increased in fame. Marlowe, Massinger, Ford,
Decker, Middleton, Webster, and others of his associates led
precarious and irregular lives as hack-writers for the stage, but
Shakespeare, in his triple functions as actor, author, and shareholder
of the Blackfriars and the Globe, rapidly acquired a fortune. As early
as 1597, after ten years in London, at the age of thirty-four, he had
amassed enough to enable him to buy New Place, the largest mansion in
Stratford, built by Sir Hugh Clopton, and from time to time he added
to his possessions by the purchase of real estate and tithes, till he
became the wealthiest citizen of his native town. He was also the
owner of improved property in London, near St. Paul's Cathedral,
bought three years before his death. No doubt the bitter recollections
of the privations of his childhood, and the humiliations resulting
from his father's heedless improvidence, stimulated his purpose to
retrieve the misfortunes of his family, establish them in comfort and
dignity amid the familiar scenes of his youth, and retire from the
scene of his triumphs to the shadowy forests and sylvan vistas of the
Avon, where his life began.

The "Great House" in New Place, where Shakespeare led the life of a
country gentleman after breaking the magician's wand, like the other
residences in Stratford, must have stood even with the street, for the
brick arches of part of the foundation, and fragments of the side and
cross walls remain, being co