ry he knew was learned

tut this was literally true his knowl

i late and ended early, had many gaps

incorrect,

po or a dramatist does

ve the literal history. He uses its

four years of life that yet remained to him. Of his life in London we have only an occasional gleam in the writings of his contemporaries. One of these said, in a book called "Wit's Treasury," published in 1598, when the poet was thirty-five years old, that William Shakespeare was the chief living poet and dramatist of England. Spenser called him:

The man whom nature's self hath made,

To mock herself, and truth to imitate.

Ben Johnson, who knew him well, called him:
Soul of the age;

The applause, delight and wonder of our stage:

and names him "The Sweet Swan of Avon," saying that he was "not for a day, but for all time." Milton, outdoing the rest in hyperbole, closes the poem addressed to him thus: Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie,

That kings, for such a tomb would wish to die.

To collect what has been written about Shakespeare since his own time would be to make, as has been well said, not a volume, but a library. The whole reading world has combined to do homage to his greatness.

Shakespeare retired to his native town a rich man for those days, bought a handsome residence called the New Place, and we may imagine, for nobody knows-lived the free-and-easy life of a country squire. His only son, Hamnet, died at eleven years old. This son and Judith, his twin sister, were named after a baker and his wife, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. An older daughter, Susanna, and his daughter Judith, survived him. Both were married and left children, but the family died out before the end of the century.

The old house in Henley street where the poet was born has been wisely bought and preserved by the British

government, and is still the resort of pilgrims from all quarters of the world. The "New Place," a handsome house and grounds where he spent his latter years, fell into the hands of a vandal who, not wishing to live in it, pulled it down that he might not have to pay the taxes on it. Westminster Abbey has a monument to Shakespeare, but his dust lies beneath the pavement of the parish church at Stratford-on-Avon, with the well-known lines carved on the stone:

Good friend, for Iesus' sake, forbeare

To digg the dust enclosed heare.

Blest be ye man yt spares these stones,

And curst be he yt moves my bones.*

These words may be the expression of a wish expressed during the poet's lifetime, but can scarcely be received as the product of his muse.

EFORE passing on to the literature which belongs

wholly to the seventeenth century, we must go back to the two great prose-writers whose lives were spent almost equally in the sixteenth and seventeenth, although their writings place them in very different categories. These are Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon.

Of the many-sided Raleigh (1552-1618), the "Shepherd of the Ocean," as Spenser quaintly calls him, we can give but a few details, sufficient, it is hoped, to induce the young reader to seek the records of that brilliant life in larger works. He came from an old, though not a noble

* The letter in the Saxon alphabet which represents the sound of "h" is nearly identical with our letter "y."