tudied all trades and professions he encountered in daily
contact with mankind. He thought what he was and was what he thought! To
him a sermon was a preacher, a writ a lawyer, a pill a doctor, a sail a
sailor, a sword a soldier, a button a tailor, a nail a carpenter, a hammer
a blacksmith, a trowel a stone mason, a pebble a geologist, a flower a
botanist, a ray of light an astronomer, and even a _word_ gave him ample
suggestion to build up an empire of thought.

He sailed upon the tides and currents of the human heart, and steered
through the cliffs and caverns of the brain with greater glory than those
who sought the golden "fleece" among the enchanting waters of Ionian isles.

Shakspere conjured the characters of his plays from elemental principles,
measures not men, breathing and acting in his divine atmosphere. It is
strange and marvelous that he never wrote a line about the great men that
lived and wrote in his day and age, although Cervantes, Rubens, Camoens,
Bruno, Drake, Raleigh, Calderon, Corneille, Rembrandt, Kepler, Galileo,
Montaigne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Ben Jonson
were contemporaneous authors, poets, dramatists, navigators, soldiers,
astronomers and philosophers.

Licentious phrases and actions were universal in Shakspere's time, and from
the corrupt courts of King Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth and King James, to
the cot of the peasant and trail of the tavern, morality hid her modest
head and only flourished among the puritans and philosophers who kept alive
the flame of love and liberty.

Dryden, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe and Jonson infected literature with a
species of eloquent vulgarity, and Shakspere, willing to please, readily
infused into his various plays sensuous phrases to catch the rabble cheers
and purpled applause. While he worshiped nature, he never failed to bend
the knee for ready cash, and often paid fulsome tribute to lords and
ladies, who flattered his vanity and ministered to his "itching palm."

Physical passion, mental license and social tyranny ruled in home, church
and state, where Rome and Reformation struggled viciously for the mastery.

There are nuggets of golden thought still scattered through the plays of
Shakspere that no author or actor has ever discovered, and although they
have read and repeated his lines, for more than three hundred years, there
has been no brain able and brilliant enough to delve into or explain the
secret caves of Shaksperi