ore the family fortunes
and build up his own estate. We know that he bought the best house in
the town, that he planted an orchard, developed his gardens, and made
extensive purchase of farm-lands, some years before he could hope to
settle down in comfort to their enjoyment. It may be that the knowledge
that the new home was ready for him helped to put a period to the London
labours. He did not give any sign of appreciating the full significance
of his own work, or appear to know that he had made a position that
placed him side by side with Geoffrey Chaucer in merit, and still higher
in world renown. He never pushed the advantages that a connection at
Court and the favour of King James might have given him--he was only too
pleased to retire, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," while he
was yet on the sunny side of fifty. Man of affairs sufficiently to seek
the law-courts on the smallest provocation, idealist to the extent of
preferring a simple country life to all the glamour of London, a man
seemingly endowed with all the ambitions of the most sober and
unimaginative middle class--truly he presents strange and baffling
contrasts.

In the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, we may presume that
Shakespeare retired from the actor's profession in 1611, on or before
the completion of "The Tempest," into the closing act of which he would
seem to have put a reflection of his own inmost thought. Of all the rich
and varied emotions to which such a mind must have responded, there
could have been none more stirring than the thought that his life-work
had brought the reward he most desired. To the town from which he had
fled as an outcast he was returning a man of substance and repute; to
the failing fortunes of those he had left behind he had become a sure
support. Father, mother, one brother, Edmund, and the little son Hamnet
had gone before him "to that bourn from which no traveller returns," but
there were two loving daughters and a granddaughter waiting to welcome
him home, one sister, Joan, and two brothers, Gilbert and Richard. There
was Michael Drayton, author of the "Shepherd's Garland," the man after
his own heart, to whose charming sonnets he was indebted for some of the
beauty of his own, and it may be that some of his old companions of the
stage could be lured to New Place in the intervals of their touring. For
one who knew as well as Shakespeare the changes and uncertainties of
life, there must have