of an audience
like Shakspere, for, over the crude thoughts of other dramatic writers he
threw the glamour of his divine imagination, making the shrubs, vines and
briers of life bloom into perpetual flowers of pleasure and beauty.

_With his mystic wand he mesmerized all,
And peasants transformed to kings;
While age after age in cottage and hall,
He soars with imperial wings._

No one mind ever comprehended Shakspere, and even all the authors and
readers that sauntered over his wonderful garden of literary flowers and
fruits have but barely clipped at the hedge-rows of his philosophy, culling
a few fragmentary mementos from his immortal productions.

Shakspere's chirography was almost as variable as his mind, and when he sat
down to compose plays for the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, in his room
adjacent to the Miter Tavern, he dashed off chunks of thought for pressing
and waiting actors and managers, piecing them together like a cabinet
joiner or machinist.

In all his compositions he used, designedly, a pale blue ink that
evaporated in the course of a year, and the cunning actors and publishers,
who knew his secret, copied and memorized and printed his immortal
thoughts. He kept a small bottle of indelible ink for ideals on parchment
for posterity.

I have often found his room littered and covered with numbered sheets of
scenes and acts, ready for delivery to actors for recital, and many times
the sunset over London would run its round to sunrise and find William at
his desk in the rookery, hammering away on the anvil of thought, fusing
into shape his divine masterpieces.

Shakspere's bohemian life was but an enlarged edition of his rural vagabond
career through the fields and alehouses of Warwickshire. He only needed
about four hours' sleep in twenty-four, but when composition on occasion
demanded rapidity, he could work two days and rise from his labor as fresh
as a lark from the flowery bank of Avon.

Most of the great writers of antiquity patterned after greater than
themselves, but Shakspere evolved from the illuminated palace of his soul
the songs and sentiments that move the ages and make him the colossal
champion of beauty, mercy, charity, purity, courage, love and truth.

There are more numerous nuggets of thought in the works of Shakspere than
in all the combined mass of ancient and modern literature.

The various bibles, composed and manufactured by man, cannot compare in
v