Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though
his contribution to the poet's praise be no more than a little note in a
private diary. His journey will open a fresh field of literary research,
if he be not already a student of Elizabethan literature. He will be
enrolled on the long and unexhausted list of pilgrims to the shrine of
the country's greatest poet, the man whose thoughts have lost nothing of
their depth and beauty in the slow passage of three eventful centuries.

CHAPTER II

THE POET'S YOUTH

In these days, when biographies of nobody in particular are as the sand
upon the seashore for multitude, and the demand for personal paragraphs
is seemingly well-nigh as great as the supply, we have some occasion to
regret the absence of similar craving in the spacious times of Queen
Elizabeth. If there had been a daily, weekly, or monthly publication
that submitted famous men to the ordeal of the interview, we might
pardon the glut of our latter day. Unhappily for our desire to know what
manner of man Shakespeare was, the available records are exceedingly
scanty, or are at least insufficient for our legitimate needs, and we
are face to face with the initial difficulty that in the sixteenth
century Shakespeare's name was quite common. From Cumberland down to
Warwickshire there was probably no county in which a William Shakespeare
could not have been found for the searching, and this fact is
accountable for many curious mistakes that have been made by students
and biographers. In Warwickshire alone there were more than a score of
families bearing the surname in the sixteenth century, and half as many
again in the following century, when the name was one to conjure with.
The poet's father, John Shakespeare, who was a native of Snitterfield
and moved to Stratford in the middle of the sixteenth century, to carry
on what would seem to have been the business of a big store-keeper,
applied for a right to bear arms towards the century's close, and made
certain claims on behalf of ancestors. But the opinion of competent
critics is that John Shakespeare was as capable of drawing the long-bow
as he was of selling general stores, and that he was closely connected,
from a mental standpoint, with the successful tradesmen of our day who,
having proved fortunate business men, seek to confer upon themselves
such advantage as a dubious pedigree may assure. We cannot, then, accept
the version of his family history that satisfied