hile causing us to laugh at folly, and shudder
at crime, he still preserves our love for our fellow-beings, and our
reverence for ourselves.

Shakespeare was familiar with all beautiful forms and images, with
all that is sweet or majestic in the simple aspects of nature, of
that indestructible love of flowers and fragrance, and dews, and
clear waters--and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies and woodland
solitudes, and moon-light bowers, which are the material elements of
poetry,--and with that fine sense of their indefinable relation to
mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul--and which, in
the midst of his most busy and tragical scenes, falls like gleams of
sunshine on rocks and ruins--contrasting with all that is rugged or
repulsive, and reminding us of the existence of purer and brighter
elements.

These things considered, what wonder is it that the works of
Shakespeare, next to the Bible, are the most highly esteemed of all the
classics of English literature. "So extensively have the characters of
Shakespeare been drawn upon by artists, poets, and writers of fiction,"
says an American author,--"So interwoven are these characters in the
great body of English literature, that to be ignorant of the plot of
these dramas is often a cause of embarrassment."

But Shakespeare wrote for grown-up people, for men and women, and in
words that little folks cannot understand.

Hence this volume. To reproduce the entertaining stories contained
in the plays of Shakespeare, in a form so simple that children can
understand and enjoy them, was the object had in view by the author of
these Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare.

And that the youngest readers may not stumble in pronouncing any
unfamiliar names to be met with in the stories, the editor has prepared
and included in the volume a Pronouncing Vocabulary of Difficult Names.
To which is added a collection of Shakespearean Quotations, classified
in alphabetical order, illustrative of the wisdom and genius of the
world's greatest dramatist.

E. T. R.

A BRIEF LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE.

In the register of baptisms of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon,
a market town in Warwickshire, England, appears, under date of April 26,
1564, the entry of the baptism of William, the son of John Shakspeare.
The entry is in Latin--"Gulielmus filius Johannis Shakspeare."

The date of William Shakespeare's birth has usually been taken as three
days before hi