ariety, common sense and eloquence, with the productions of the Immortal
Bard.

All the preachers, bishops, popes, kings, and emperors that have ever
conjured up texts and creeds for dupes, devotees and designers to swallow
without question, have never yet sunk the plummet of reason so deep in the
human heart as the butcher boy of Stratford!

Shakspere was the most industrious literary prospector and miner of any
land or time, throwing his searchlight of reason into the crude mass of
Indian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Frank, German, Russian
and Briton lore, and forthwith appropriated the golden beauties of each
nation, leaving behind the dross of vice and vulgarity.

Marlowe, Burbage, Peele, Chapman, Greene and Jonson composed many fine
physical and licentious dramas, pandering to the London groundlings,
bloated wealth and accidental power; but Shakspere threw a spiritual
radiance over their brutal, sordid phrases and elevated stage characters
into the realm of romantic thought, pinioned with hope, love and truth. His
sublime imagination soared away into the flowery uplands of Divinity, and
plucked from the azure wings of angels brilliant feathers of fancy that
shall shine and flutter down the ages.

He flung his javelin of wit through the buckler of ignorance, bigotry and
tyranny, exposing their rotten bodies to the ridicule and hate of mankind.

In lordly language he swept over the harp strings of the heart with
infinite expression and comprehension of words, leaving in his intellectual
wake a multifarious heritage of brain jewels. He flew over the world like a
swarm of bees, robbing all the fields of literature of their secret sweets,
storing the rich booty of Nature in the honeycomb of his philosophic hive.

Through his brain the variegated paraphernalia of Nature, in field, forest,
vale, mount, river, sea and sky were illuminated with a divine radiance
that shall shine forever and grow greater as mankind grows wiser.

Shakspere has paid the greatest tribute of respect of any writer to women.
While he gives us a few scolding, licentious, cruel, criminal women, like
Dame Quickly, Katharina, Tamora, Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, he gives us the
beautiful, faithful, loving characters of Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona,
Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia and Cordelia, whose love-lit
words and phrases shine out in the firmament of purity and devotion like
morning stars in tropic skies.

Shakspere s