with the arms of their patrons, their costumes were rich and varied, and they were accompanied by grooms and servants of all sorts. A goodly company they must have seemed to a child's imagination, with an air of easy opulence worn as a part of their vocation, but as purely imitative as the parts they played to crowds of open-mouthed rustics. Their magnificence, however shabby, and their brave air, however swaggering, made rural England feel as if it had touched the great new world of adventure and fame and wealth, of which stories were told in every chimney corner. To these companies of players Stratford appears to have given exceptional hospitality; the people of the place were lovers of the drama. In the course of two decades the town enjoyed no less than twenty-four visits from strolling companies; a fact of very obvious bearing on the education of Shakespeare's imagination and the bent of his mind toward a vocation. In such a community there must have been constant talk about plays and players, and easy familiarity with the resources and art of the actor. It follows, too, that the presence of so many players in the little village brought boys of an inquiring turn of mind into personal contact with the comedians and tragedians of the day. As a boy, Shakespeare came to know the old English plays which were the stock in trade of the travelling companies; he learned the stage business, and he was undoubtedly on terms of familiarity with men of gift and art. For the purposes of his future work this education was far more stimulating and formative than any which he could have secured at Eton or Winchester during the same impressionable years. Scott's specific training for the writing of the Waverley novels and the narrative poems which bear his name was gained in his ardent reading and hearing of old Scotch ballads, romances, stories, and history, rather than in the lecture-rooms of the University of Edinburgh. Shakespeare has sometimes been represented as a boy of obscure parentage and vulgar surroundings; he was, as a matter of fact, the son of a man of energy and substance, the foremost citizen of Stratford. He has often been represented as wholly lacking educational opportunities; he was, as a matter of fact, especially fortunate in educational opportunities of the most fertilizing and stimulating kind. The singular misconception which has identified education exclusively with formal academic training has made it possible to hold men of the genius of Shakespeare, Burns, and Lincoln before the world as exceptions to the law that no art can be mastered save through a thorough educational process. If Burns and Lincoln were not so near us, the authorship of "Tam o' Shanter" and the Gettysburg address would have been challenged on the ground of inadequate preparation for such masterpieces of expression. These three masters of speech were exceptionally well educated for their art, for no man becomes an artist except by the way of apprenticeship; but their education was individual rather than formal, and liberating rather than disciplinary. The two poets were saturated in the most sensitive period in the unfolding of the imagination with the very genius of the people among whom they were to work and whose deepest instincts they were to interpret. Their supreme good fortune lay in the fact that they were educated through the imagination rather than through the memory and the rationalizing faculties. Homer, Eschylus, and Sophocles were educated by the same method; so also was Dante. A man sometimes gets this kind of education in the schools, but he oftener misses it. He is always supremely fortunate if he gets it at all. Shakespeare received it from several sources; one of them being the love of the drama in the town in which he was born, access to its records of every sort, and acquaintanceship with the custodians of its traditions and the practitioners of its art. But he was by no means lacking in educational opportunities of a formal kind. The Grammar School on Church Street, adjoining the Guild Chapel and across Chapel Lane from the site of the poet's later home, one of the oldest and most picturesque buildings now standing in Stratford, was founded at the close of the fifteenth century. It was part of an older religious foundation, of which the Chapel still remains, and which once included a hospital. After passing through many vicissitudes, the school was reconstituted in the time of Edward VI. The Chapel was used in connection with it, and, if tradition is to be accepted, was occasionally employed for school purposes. It was built about the middle of the thirteenth century, and is a characteristic bit of the England which Shakespeare saw. The low, square tower must have been one of the most familiar landmarks of Stratford in his eyes. He saw it when he came, a schoolboy, from his father's house in Henley Street, and turned into High Street; and from his own home at New Place he must have looked at it from all his southern windows. The interior of the Chapel has suffered many things at the hands of iconoclasts and restorers, but remains substantially as Shakespeare knew it. The low ceilings and old furnishings of the Grammar School, blackened with time, make one aware, like the much initialed and defaced forms in the older rooms at Eton, that education in England has a long history. In Shakespeare's time the Renaissance influence was at its height, and the schools were bearing the fruits of the new learning. Education was essentially literary, and dealt almost exclusively with the humanities. Greek was probably within reach of boys of exceptional promise as students; but Latin was every boy's daily food. With Plautus and Terence, the masters of Latin comedy, with Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, the masters of Latin poetry, with Cicero the orator and Seneca the moralist, Shakespeare made early acquaintance. When Sir Hugh Evans, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," listens to the recitation, so familiar to all boys of English blood, of Hic, Hæc, Hoc, we are doubtless sharing a reminiscence of the poet's school days. The study of grammar and the practice of conversation prepared the way for the reading of the classic writers, and furnished an education which was not only disciplinary but invigo rating. Without being in any sense a scholar, there is abundant evidence that Shakespeare knew other languages and literatures than his own. His knowl edge was of the kind which a man of his quality of mind and educational opportunities might be expected to possess. It was entirely subordinate to the end of furnishing the material he wished to use; it was vital rather than exact; it was used freely, without any pretension to thoroughness; it served immediate ends with the highest intelligence, and is inaccurate with the indifference of a poet who was more concerned with the sort of life led in Bohemia than with its boundary lines. The great artists have been noted for their insight rather than their accuracy; not because they have been untrained, but because they have used facts simply to get at truth. Shakespeare could be as accurate as a scientist when exactness served his purpose, as the description of the Dover Cliff in " King Lear" shows. In the plays there are recurring evidences that the poet knew Virgil and Ovid, and had not forgotten Lily's grammar and the "Sententiæ Pueriles," which the schoolboys of his time committed to memory as a matter of course. In a number of instances he used the substance of French and Italian books of which English translations had not been made in his time. The command of French and Italian for reading purposes, to a boy of Shakespeare's quickness of mind. and power of rapid assimilation, with his knowledge of Latin and the widespread interest among men of his class in the literature of both countries, was easily |