d circus exhibitions generate in the
human heart.

Plays of Roman, Spanish and German origin, as well as those of Old Albion,
were enacted on our rural stage, and although we had not the paraphernalia
and scenery of the London actors, we made up in frantic enthusiasm what we
lacked in artistic finish, and often in our amateur exhibitions at balls,
fairs, races and May Day Morris dances, we "astonished the natives," who
paid from a penny to sixpence to see and hear the "Stratford Oriental
Theatrical Company."

Shakspere always took a leading part in every play, poem and declamation,
but when an encore was given and a demand for a recitation on love, Will
was in his natural element and gave the eager audience dashes from Ovid's
Metamorphoses or Petrarch's Sonnets.

The local company had a large assortment of poetic and theatrical
translations, and many of the boys and girls who had passed through the
Latin school, could "spout" the rhythmic lines of Ovid, Virgil, Horace or
Petrarch in the original language. And strange to say, the Warwickshire
audience would cheer the Latin more than the English rendition, on the
principle that the least you know about a thing the more you enjoy it!
Thus pretense and ignorance make a stagger at information, and while
fooling themselves, imagine that they fool their elbow neighbor!

Shakspere had a most marvelous memory, and his sense of taste, smell,
feeling, hearing and particularly seeing was abnormally developed, and
constant practice in talking and copying verses and philosophic sentences
made him almost perfect in his deductions and conclusions. He was a natural
orator, and impressed the beholder with his superiority.

He had a habit of copying the best verses, dramatic phrases and orations of
ancient authors, and then to show his superiority of epigrammatic, incisive
style, he could paraphrase the poems of other writers into his own divine
sentences, using the crude ore of Homeric and Platonic philosophy,
resolving their thoughts into the best form of classic English, lucid,
brave and blunt!

I have often tested his powers of lightning observation with each of us
running by shop windows in Stratford, Oxford or London, and betting a
dinner as to who could name the greatest number of objects, and he
invariably could name correctly three to my one. In visiting country
farmers in search of cattle, sheep or pigs he could mount a stone fence or
climb a hedge row gate, and by a glanc