of Shakspere and the advocates of the
Baconian theory make much of the traditional wildness of Shakspere's
youth. The common argument is that a man who is charged with the
poaching of deer in his youth is too bad to write good poetry,
therefore Bacon wrote Shakspere. Was Bacon an angel? By the same
process of reasoning Burns could not have written the Cotter's
Saturday Night. But I deny that Shakspere was profligate, and in
making this denial I need not prove the impeccability of Shakspere.
But his life was essentially pure, his heart good, because the
influence of the life is sane and wholesome.

Not alone the greatest intellect of his time, of all times, but also
the greatest heart, was that possessed by this Warwickshire poet. As a
man thinketh in his heart so he is. As Shakspere was, so he wrote.
This crystalline wholesome water dashing over this rocky cliff did
not have its origin in yonder pool. Pure water does not flow from a
mud-puddle. Here is a man who in twenty years writes in round numbers
forty productions--the task of Hercules. The product of the man
attests the nobility of his soul. No man can labor for twenty years
without putting his stamp upon his work. Shakspere was no bar-room
brawler, no prodigal spender of time and substance in riotous living.
He lived to the mature age of fifty-two and died a well-to-do man. The
prodigals of the world do not retire with a competency. I repeat that
Shakspere was not impeccable; he was no Puritan; but we cannot think
of the creator of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia,
Portia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Prospero as other than a man of a
contrite spirit and a pure heart. As he surpassed his contemporaries
in breadth and loftiness of intellect, so too he surpassed them in the
reach and vigor of his moral feeling.

We cannot believe that this man who penetrated deeper than others into
the mystery of life missed the meaning of his own life. Let us hear
the conclusion of the whole matter--the power that moves the world is
not brilliancy of intellect; it is purity of heart. Nobility of
character is the essence of powerful personality. Lincoln is greater
than Webster, Washington than Jefferson, not through greater mental
grasp, but because of a purer spiritual essence. The world without
takes its meaning and color from the world within. Shakspere saw a
world of pure passion and wholesome sanity because his world within
was pure and sane.

[Illustration: JOHN