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 gentleman'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 33

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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 Johnson 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, 66 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 very ill-founded prejudice, to imagine that any thing 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

from all manner of restraint, as perilous to their high prerogative. Genius is neither above law, nor opposed to it; but, provided only that the law to which it is proposed to subject it be one worthy of its obedience, finds its best strength, as well as its most appropriate embellishment, in wearing its fetters. Art, which is the manifestation of genius, is equally the manifestation of judgment; which, instead, therefore, of being something irreconcileable with genius, may, from this truth, be discerned to be not only its most natural ally, but, in all its highest creations, its indispensable associate and fellowlabourer.

The name of Shakspeare naturally recalls that of BURNS, the next greatest poet (unless we reckon Homer in that list) that ever was formed merely or chiefly by the discipline of self tuition; and also, considered without reference to his poetical powers, another striking example of what a man may do in educating himself, and acquiring an extensive acquaintance with literature, while occupying a very humble rank in society, and even struggling with the miseries of the most cruel indigence. Burns has himself given us a sketch of his early life, in a letter to Dr Moore. His father, a man of a decidedly superior mind, and with even something of literary acquirement beyond his station, had led a life of hard labour and poverty; and at the time of his son Robert's birth, was employed as gardener by a gentleman in the neighbourhood of the town of Ayr. A few years afterwards, he took a small farm, on which, however, his utmost exertions, and those of the members of his family, who were able to give him any assistance, seem to have hardly sufficed to earn a subsistence without running in debt. "The farm," says his son, "proved a ruinous bargain. . . . My father was advanced in life when he married: I was

the eldest of seven children; and he, worn out by early hardships, was unfit for labour. My father's spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in his lease in two years more; and to weather these two years we retrenched our expenses. We lived very poorly. I was a dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother (Gilbert), who could drive the plough very well and help me to thresh the corn. . . . This kind of life-the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave-brought me to my sixteenth year."

On the expiration of this lease, his father took another farm. "For four years," continues Burns, "we lived comfortably here; but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to terms, after three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a consumption, which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped in, and carried him away to where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Yet it was during this time that the future poet made his first important acquisitions in literature. "I was, at the beginning of this period," says he, "perhaps the most ungainly, awkward boy in the parish,-no solitaire was less acquainted with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the Spectator." He then goes on to enumerate the other books to which his reading extended. The whole formed a sufficiently miscellaneous collection, although not very numėrous; the principal being Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakspeare, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Allan 33*

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