Or the greatest of poets, the briefest biography. John Shakspeare, retired shopkeeper, bailiff and alderman of Stratford, was the father of five children-William, Gilbert, John, Anne, and Richard. The mother, Mary Shakspeare, was granddaughter of a valet-de-chambre to Henry VII. This was the Shakspeare family. The children were sent to the town school, where they learned something of Latin and a little Greek. It is of the eldest boy alone, however, that we have anything further to record.

At seventeen, William married a lady eight years his senior. Shortly after was born his first child, Susannah; and one year later, twins. These were his last children. The young husband suddenly quitted Stratford, came to London, and joined a troupe of actors. In this ven

ture he was not unsuccessful, for it is known that he very soon held a share in the Blackfriars Theatre.

At this point his real history begins. Let us sum up, according to the most probable conjecture, the life of "the greatest man the world e'er saw," in four decades.

At twenty, he had written the "Venus and Adonis;" at thirty, "Titus Andronicus," and the "Comedy of Errors;" at forty, "Romeo and Juliet," the "Merchant of Venice," the "Merry Wives of Windsor," and those strange revelations, the "Sonnets;" had built a new theatre, and brought out "Hamlet." At fifty, he had produced "Macbeth," "King Lear," "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "The Tempest;" had purchased the best house in Stratford, had disposed of his daughter in marriage, become a grandfather, and had quitted the profession with an income of five hundred pounds a year.

Two years after this he died of a fever, and was buried at Stratford. Seven years afterwards appeared the first edition of his plays.

Shakspeare was a handsome, well-shaped man, with eyes of a light hazel colour, and hair and beard of auburn hue; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant and smooth wit."

Whatever exists

It is doubtful whether he ever sat for a portrait. of him was probably drawn from memory. The most authentic likeness is said to be the bust upon his tomb at Stratford, yet this was made seven years after his death. Of this statue it is said, "The contour of the head is very fine; the lips are carefully carved, the nose slightly curtailed."

Next comes the portrait engraved at the head of the folio edition, and this has in its favour the testimony of Ben Jonson.

While the best known, unquestionably, is the Chandos, the magnificent oil painting now displayed at the South Kensington Museum.

Still more highly idealized is the Jansen portrait. Of this portrait, alleged to have been painted by Jansen, for the Earl of Southampton, from life, it has been observed:-"Nothing can more distinctly embody our conceptions of Shakspeare. It is extremely handsome; the forehead elevated and ample, the eyes clear, mild, and benignant; the nose well-formed, the mouth closed, the lips slightly compressed, the hair receding from the forehead, as of one who will soon be bald; the beard gracefully disposed, and a very neat lace collar thrown over such a dress as the Poet might be supposed to wear. Indeed, at this period the Players in general are censured for being splendidly dressed in silks and satins."

Probably, when all the evidence both internal and external is weighed, we may safely accept the following conclusion: the Jansen is the ideal Shakspeare, the folio print is the real Shakspeare.

Such was the man of whom there have been written-not volumes, but libraries.

His favourite books were Plutarch and Montaigne; his hero was Julius Cæsar; his aversion was the Puritan spirit; his greatest creation was "Hamlet."

The peculiar quality of his mind has been expressed in three words -a complete imagination.

In reality, that which we think of, first and last, in connection with Shakspeare, is his creation of characters. Taine in his "English Literature groups them into five classes: brutes and idiots, like Caliban, Ajax, Cloten, Polonius, and the Nurse; people of wit-like Mercutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, Benedict, the Clown, and Falstaff; women -Desdemona, Juliet, Miranda, Imogen, Cordelia, Ophelia, Volumnia; villains - Iago and Richard III.; characters of an excessive or diseased imagination-Lear, Othello, Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Hamlet. All these he finds united in their Author. "Go through the groups, and you will only discern in them divers forms and divers states of the same power: here the flock of brutes, dotards, and gossips made up of a mechanical imagination; further on, the company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish imagination; then the charming swarm of women, whom their delicate imagination raises so high, and their selfforgetting love carries so far; elsewhere, the band of villains, hardened by unbridled passions, inspired by the artist's imagination; in the centre, the mournful train of grand characters whose excited brain is filled with excited or criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. . . . An opera without music--a concert of melancholy and tender sentiment, which bears the mind into the supernatural world, and brings before the mind, on its fairy wings, the genius which has created it."

MILTON was born in London. His father, whose conversion to Protestantism had cost him his fortune, had embraced the profession of notary, and by incessant activity had acquired a competency sufficient to place the family in comfortable circumstances, and to give the son a sound education by a good tutor under the paternal roof.

The boy's first preceptor was Thomas Young, a man whose religious austerity exercised a great influence upon the mind and destiny of his pupil. Study shortly became a passion for the ardent young spirit; and already in early years we perceive the germs of that double exaltation, poetic and religious, which was to stamp the character of his genius.

The romances of Chively, the heroic poems of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, and the Bible, were his choice in reading. They became pro

foundly engraved in his memory, and were always the favourite sources from which he drew his inspirations.

At sixteen he was sent to Cambridge, at which place he became noted for his verses and his erudition, was made Master of Arts at twenty-four, and had thoughts of becoming a clergyman. This step, however, his love of liberty would not permit him to take. He decided to devote a few years to enlarging the circle of his acquirements. Already he read Homer, Virgil, and Dante in their own language; he now learned Hebrew, so as to read the Bible in the original text, but his time was chiefly given to the study of the best Greek and Latin authors. It was at this period also that he composed his best miscellaneous poems"Comus," "Lycidas," &c. After the death of his mother, in 1637, he resolved to complete his knowledge by making the grand classical

tour.

He visited France, and was presented to Grotius. Arriving in Italy he went first to Pisa, then to Florence. Several times he saw Galileo. From Florence he went to Rome. Here he had access to the splendid Vatican Library; here he contemplated the walls of the Sixtine Chapel, covered with the frescoes of Michael Angelo-saw the Madonnas of the divine Raphael, saw his Transfiguration, and the Loggie, that extraordinary work-the whole Bible translated into pictures. Here also he saw the Miracle Play of the "Disobedience of Adam and Eve."

Already to his mind came the ideas of the "Paradise Lost."

But Milton was not all poet. Trouble fell upon England in 1639. Milton was now thirty, the age of intellectual virility; he had a profound erudition, extensive knowledge fortified by travel and the contemplation of art. He felt himself ready to take a part in the coming struggle. He threw himself into the mêlée, launching his first bolt, "Reformation in England." He followed it by "The Prelatical Episcopacy," and "Church Government against Prelaty."

"How to solder, how to stop a leak, how to keep up the floating carcase of a crazed and diseased monarchy or state betwixt wind and water, swimming still upon her own dead lees-that now is the deep design of a politician..

What they

"Of this third and last sort that hinder reformation. can bring up now from the schools of Loyola and the Jesuits, or their Malvezzi, that can cut Tacitus into slivers and steaks, we shall presently hear."

The blow struck home; it created the celebrated remonstrance of the Long Parliament. That document was a paraphrase of Milton's pamphlets.

Four years from this time Milton married. The union was not happy; we find the wife returning to her parents, and the husband writing pamphlets in favour of divorce. Afterwards he took a "noble revenge" in