udience,
the great children and characters of his matchless brain would hold the
dramatic boards and thrill the heart and soul of mankind as long as human
nature laughed and suffered on the globe.

Shakspere had more self-control than any man I ever met, and his reason was
ever holding court in his conscience.

_He, who reigns within himself, and rules
His passions, desires and fears, is ever King!_

After thirty years of a wandering battle with Dame Fortune, testing her
griefs and glories, it was a sweet consolation for William and myself to
drift back to the scenes of childhood and tread again the streets, roads,
fields and hills that blessed our boyhood hours.

In the spring of 1614 William and myself wandered over the fields and
ridges to Coventry, and visited Warwick Castle. The young Earl of Leicester
gave us a hearty welcome; for the praise that William had received at court
and the light that dazzled from his lamp of literary fame made him an
honored guest in cot or palace, strewing about his pathway the flowers of
faith and affection.

Returning to Stratford one evening in May we stood on the same old hill top
beyond the Clopton Bridge, looking at the sparkling spires and steeples of
the town; and all seemed as natural as when we left them in the morning of
life.

The hills and fields were blooming as of old, the Avon wound its serpentine
course to the sea, the song of the ploughman and shepherd swelled from the
vale, the lowing of cattle, strolling homeward for the night echoed among
the hills, the blackbird, thrush and vagrant crow sang and croaked as they
hastened with their mates to their feathered families, and the daisies,
wild roses, hedge rows, hawthorn bushes, and grand old elms and oaks
bloomed in their everlasting garments of variegated beauty.

As the cardinal colors of the dying day threw their last rays over the
placid bosom of the Avon, and the murmur of laughing voices floated up from
the town to mingle, as it were, with the curling smoke from glistening
chimney tops, William and I scampered down the hill, over the bridge, on by
the old mill, and entered the open gate of "New Place," as Judith, his
intellectual daughter, welcomed her famous father with exuberant affection.

Here was rest indeed. For like weather-beaten mariners or soldiers of
fortune, each of us had been buffeted by the billows of Fate; and yet with
all the scars she gave, we never knew a day, though cloudy and s