CHAPTER XXII.

Self-tuition. Shakspeare: Burns.

It is an interesting train of reflection which is excited by the fact, first noticed, we believe, by Mr. Malone, that the father of SHAKSPEARE Could not write his own name, a cross remaining to this day as his mark or signature in the records of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, of which he was an alderman. Had the great dramatist himself been born half a century earlier, he probably might have lived and died as ignorant as his father appears to have been; and a few rudely scrawled crosses might have been the only efforts in the art of writing of that hand to which we owe so many an immortal page. That Shakspeare's own education, however, embraced at least English reading and writing, there can be no doubt. Dr. Farmer, in a well-known essay, distinguished by its ingenuity and learning, has attempted to shew that he never had acquired any knowledge of the ancient languages, and owed his acquaintance with classical literature entirely to translations. Perhaps in this the learned critic goes a little too far. Shakspeare was evidently a great reader, for his poetry abounds with allusions, more or less accurate, to all the learning of his age, of which not even the most curious and abstruse departments seem to have escaped his attention. Of this any one may convince himself merely by perusing a few pages of the elaborate commentaries that have been written upon his works, and observing how the erudition of succeeding times has exhausted itself, sometimes in vain, in attempting to pursue the excursive

range of his memory and his fancy. It may be conceded, however, that his native tongue was probably the only one which he read with much facility, and that to it he was indebted for nearly all he knew. And it is not to be overlooked, that in writing his plays, in particular, it was probably deliberately, and upon system, that he preferred taking his version of the ancient story rather from the English translation than from the original author. In those days, translations from the ancient tongues appear to have formed, in this country, no small part of the reading of the people, as the numerous performances of this kind which were produced within a few years, some of them by the ablest writers of the time, and the rapid succession of editions of several of them with which the press teemed, may serve to testify. Now it would seem to have been a maxim with Shakspeare always to give his auditors the story which was most familiar to them, and with which they had been longest acquainted, rather than one, the novelty of which they would not so easily comprehend, or with which their old impressions and affections were not so likely to sympathize. Hence, although the most original of all writers in every thing else, he seldom has recourse to his own invention for the plot or story of his drama, but seizes merely upon the popular tale.

Several peculiarities in his style would rather indicate that he knew something, at least, of the vocabulary of the Latin language, and its common forms of phraseology; or about as much as is retained of their school learning by the greater number of those who study the ancient tongues in their youth. This perhaps is, after all,

the view of the matter most consistent with the expression of his friend, Ben Jonson, who, in the verses he has written to his memory, represents

him, not as entirely ignorant of ancient literature, but only as having had "small Latin, and less Greek."

But, however this may be, Shakspeare must have taken to literature as a profession entirely of his own accord; and commenced and pursued the business of cultivating his powers by study, in the midst of circumstances very unfavourable to the prosecution of such an aim. Imperfect and uncertain as are the accounts we have of his early years, tradition is uniform in representing him to have led for some time an irregular and unsettled life. He is said, when very young, to have been for a short period in the office of a country attorney; but it is certain that he precipitately left his native place, and came up to London, with nothing but chance and his talents to depend upon, when he was about twenty-two years of age, having already a wife, to whom he had been married four or five years before, and several children. There is every reason to suppose, too, that his first employment in the metropolis was one of the very humblest: some accounts giving him only the rank of call-boy, or attendant on the prompter, at one of the theatres; while others reduce him to the still lower vocation of holding gentlemen's horses at the door during the performance. From this condition, however, he gradually raised himself by his own exertions, till he became first an actor, and, eventually, a theatrical proprietor; when, after having spent about twenty-six years in London, he returned to his native place, and purchased an estate, where he resided in affluence and respectability till his death.

Unfortunately, we know nothing of Shakspeare's studies, except by their imperishable produce. But, judging from his works, it seems plain that he must have been, as we have already said, an ardent and unwearied reader, a student both of the world of men

and of the world of books. Indeed, when he first appeared in London, whatever his mere school education had been, his acquaintance with literature, owing to the nature of his subsequent pursuits, and his scanty opportunities, could not but have been exceedingly circumscribed, and he must have made himself all that he afterwards became. His whole history, in so far as we know it, goes to prove him to have been, in his maturer days, a person of even and regular habits of life; first, accumulating what was in those times an ample fortune by the sedulous exertions of many years, and then, as soon as he had acquired this competency, wisely bidding adieu to the contests and fatigues of ambition, and retiring from the town and from fame to the country to enjoy it. Nor shall we arrive at a different conclusion with regard to his diligence and application, from a considerate examination of those matchless creations of his fancy, which he has been ignorantly asserted to have thrown off with such a careless and random precipitancy. That a mind so rich and plastic as his formed and gave forth its conceptions with a facility such as slower powers may not emulate, may be easily believed; but, although very probably a rapid, Shakspeare was certainly not a careless, writer. It is curious enough that Jonson himself, to whom has been attributed the expression of a wish that he had blotted much of what he has allowed to remain in his compositions, speaks in the poem already quoted, of his

"well-turned and true-filed lines;"

an expression which seems to impute to him rather consummate elaboration than inattention or slovenliness as a writer. The truth may probably be best gathered from the words of his two friends, Heminge and Condel, who, in their address to the reader, pre

fixed to the first folio edition of the plays, speaking of the author, say, "Who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

It is a common, but a very ill-founded prejudice, to imagine that anything like regularity or diligence is either impracticable to high genius, or unfavourable to its growth and exercise. Perfect self-controul is the crowning attribute of the very highest genius, which so far, therefore, from unfitting its possessor to submit, either in the management of his time or the direction of his thoughts, to the restraints of arrangement and system, enables him, on the contrary, to yield to them as if he felt them not; and which, by exerting this supremacy over itself, achieves, in fact, its greatest triumphs. It is true that its far-seeing eye will often discern the error or inadequacy of theories and rules of discipline, which to a narrower vision may seem perfect and incontrovertible, and will violate them, accordingly, with sufficient audacity. But when it does so, it is out of no spirit of wanton outrage, or from any inaptitude to take upon itself the obligations of a law; but merely because it must of necessity reject the law that is attempted to be imposed upon it, in order to be enabled to obey a higher and more comprehensive law of its own. It would be well if those would think of this, who, feeling within themselves merely a certain excitement and turbulence of spirit, the token, it may be, of awakening powers, but as certainly the evidence of their immaturity and weakness, mistake their feverish volatility, and unsettledness of purpose, for what they have been taught to call the lawlessness of genius; and thereupon fancy it is incumbent upon them to fly