ings, his professional income as an actor, and from
his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases
lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with
grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he
seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives
the magnificent sum of L10 (L100 of our money). He writes easily and
never corrects. He seems to set no store on his writings, which stream
from him like light from the sun. He adapts, collaborates, and has no
idea of what would be called a high vocation.

At forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously
in his native town, with occasional visits to London. At fifty-two his
health fails. He makes business-like arrangements in the event of
death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good
citizen.

Who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? Who can conceive the
likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to
the very highest platform of literature--so lofty and unattainable a
place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the
thrones where Homer, Virgil, and Dante sit? And yet his mind is set,
not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and
investments. He seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of
that high and solemn pride which made Keats say, with faltering lips,
that he believed he would be among the English poets after his death.

I came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of
the busy town. Everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of
Shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and
homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the
laurel and the throne. I groaned in spirit over the monstrous
playhouse, with its pretentious Teutonic air; I walked through the
churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church,
full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like
to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and
gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the
sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a
formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable
relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath
my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth,
and the ha