the earliest among our small
stock of traditions about Shakespeare is that recorded by Aubrey as
being derived from Stratford authority, that his father was a butcher,
and that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he
kill'd a calfe, he wold do it in a high style, and make a speech."
When his Lordship considers this old tradition in connection with the
following passage in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays,--

"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the
slaughter,"--

2 _Henry VI._ Act iii. Sc. 2.

how can he resist the conclusion, that, although the divine Williams may
not have run with "Forty," it is highly probable that he did kill
for Keyser? Let his Lordship also remember that other old tradition,
mentioned by Rowe, that John Shakespeare was "a considerable dealer
in wool," and that William, upon leaving school, "seems to have given
entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him"; and
remember, also, this passage from another of Shakespeare's earliest
plays:--

"He is too picked, too spruce, too affected,
too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may
call it...He draweth out the _thread of
his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument._"
--_Love's Labor's Lost_. Act v. Sc. 1.

Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's craft, as well as of
the art of rhetoric, compressed into that one sentence by the hydraulic
power of Shakespeare's genius? Does it not show that he was initiated in
the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, perhaps,
his earliest play? But look again at the following passage, also written
when his memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see the evidence
that _both_ these traditions were well founded:--

"So, first, the harmless sheep doth yield _his fleece;_
And, next, _his throat unto the butcher's knife."_

Could these lines have been written by a man who had not been both a
considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher who killed a calf in high
style and made a speech? Who can have a doubt about this matter, when he
appreciates rightly the following passage in "Hamlet," (Act v. Sc. 2,)
and is penetrated with the wisdom of two wise commentators upon it?--

'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-h