other names with different associations--e.g., Plato,
Charlemagne, Caesar, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Bismarck. Can it be said of
any one of these that he owed one-third of his distinction to what he
learned from manuscripts or books? We do know, indeed, that Bismarck
was a wide reader, but it was on the selective principle as a student of
history and affairs. His library grew under the influence of the
controlling purpose of his life--i.e., the unification of Germany, so
that there was no vague distribution of energy. Of Shakespeare's reading
we know less, but there is no evidence that he was a collector of books
or that he was a student after the manner of the men of letters of his
day. The best way to estimate him as a reader is to judge him by the
references in his plays, and these do not show an acquaintance with
literature so extensive as it is intensive. The impression he made on
Ben Johnson, an all-round scholar, was not one of learning--quite
otherwise. The qualities that impressed the author of _Timber, or
Discoveries upon Men and Matter_, were Shakespeare's "open and free
nature," his "excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions
wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he
should be stopped." And, true to himself, Ben Jonson immediately adds:
"_Sufflaminandus erat_, as Augustus said of Haterius." Shakespeare, when
in the company of kindred spirits, showed precisely the kind of talk we
should expect--not Latin and Greek or French and Italian quotations, not
a commentary on books past or present, but a stream of conversation
marked by brilliant fancy, startling comparison, unique contrast, and
searching pathos, wherein life, not literature, was the chief subject.

B. ISOLATION AND RETARDATION

1. Feral Men[99]

What would the results be if children born with a normal organism and
given food and light sufficient to sustain life were deprived of the
usual advantage of human intercourse? What psychic growth would be
possible?

Perhaps no character ever aroused greater interest than Caspar Hauser.
More than a thousand articles of varying merit have been written
concerning him. In the theaters of England, France, Germany, Hungary,
and Austria, plays were founded on his strange story and many able men
have figured in the history of his case.

According to a letter which he bore when found at Nuernberg one afternoon
in 1828, he was born in 1812, left on the doorstep of a Hung