two great race elements that have gone to the making of the typical modern Englishman." The influences about Shakespeare's youth were such as growing genius naturally adapts to its use. Then, as now, Warwickshire was full of that abundant and peaceful beauty which has come to represent for us the ideal English landscape. In Shakespeare's day its northern part was

overgrown by the great forest of Arden, a bit of primeval woodland like that which we enter in As You Like It; while southward of the river Avon, which runs diagonally across the county, stretched an open region of fertile farmland. Here were warm, sunny slopes, gay with those wild flowers that bloom forever for the world in Shakespeare's verse; low-lying pastures, where meditative cows stand knee-deep in grass, and through which wind the brimming waters of slow-flowing and tranquil streams. Stratford lies in this more southern portion;

but in Shakespeare's day the forest of Arden reached to within an easy distance of it for an active youth. Near his native town the young Shakespeare could loiter along country lanes, past hawthorn hedgerows or orchards white with May, coming now and then on some isolated farmhouse or on the cluster of thatched cottages that marked a tiny village. There was Snitterfield, where he must have gone to visit his grandfather; Shottery, where he wooed and won Anne Hathaway. There, in the midst of this rich midland scenery, was his own Stratford with its low wood-and-plaster houses and straggling streets, its massive grammar school, where, as a boy, he conned his Lilly's Latin Grammar. A little apart, by the glassy Avon, stood old Trinity Church, its lofty spire rising above the surrounding elms. There is abundant evidence that Shakespeare loved Warwickshire with a depth of attachment that nothing could alter. These early surroundings entered into and became a permanent part of his life and genius. His works are full of country sights and sounds; he defines for us the essence of the ideal shepherd's life; and in many a song, written to be sung in crowded London theaters, his imagination escapes to the fields and flowers of his native Warwickshire.

And Shakespeare's Warwickshire added to natural beauty the charm of local legend and the traditions of a splendid past. Within easy reach of Stratford lay Warwick, with its fine old castle, once the home of the great king-maker of the Wars of the Roses. The whole region was bound by tradition and association to that great civil strife which is one of the chief themes of Shakespeare's plays on English history. Near by was Kenilworth, the castle of Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Leicester, where the Queen was received (1575) with

magnificent revels, at which the boy Shakespeare may have been present. Traveling companies of players seem to have visited Stratford during Shakespeare's early years, whose performances he doubtless witnessed. He may even have gazed at the wonders of a miracle play at Coventry, a town some twenty miles distant, where these plays were frequently produced by the guilds.

66

Education. Besides all that he gained from such surroundings and experiences, Shakespeare had the advantage of some instruction at the town grammar school, which he probably entered in 1571, when he was seven years old. Latin was the chief study, and it is reasonably certain that Shakespeare, who remained at school about six years, gained a fair elementary knowledge of the language. By 1577 his father, who had been prosperous and respected, began to be pressed for money, and about this time Shakespeare was taken. from school. The boy, then about thirteen, may have helped his father in the business. According to an old account he was apprenticed to a butcher." However this may have been, it is practically certain that he made himself useful in some way, and that his school life was interrupted because his help was needed at home. Just how the young Shakespeare earned his bread at this time is, after all, comparatively unimportant; our real interest is in the boy himself, and the most remarkable thing we note of him is that even as a boy he had the power of observing closely and accurately the facts of the life about him. The country life of Warwickshire, its flowers and birds, its hedgerows and woodlands, the oddities of its rustics, and the narrow self-importance of its local authorities were indelibly impressed upon his memory and afterwards used in his plays. We need

not wonder how it happened that he who spent so few years at school became the greatest of English poets. Shakespeare was never what the world calls a learned man, nor a traveled man, but something far greater, a man "with his whole soul seeing." Although he had but little schooling, he was, in the best sense of the words, highly educated. He hungered for a knowledge of life, and his marvelously sensitive mind and quick intuition gathered it from every possible source. He was quick to respond to the beauty, the pathos, the comedy, and the tragedy that lay around him. This was his school. His simple neighbors, his homely duties, his rustic pleasures, gave him his first materials for his art. Afterward, when he went to London, the world of books was opened to him, and we may be sure that there the ardent youth read eagerly and rapidly the many Italian stories and novels which, as one writer of the time says, were "sold in every shop in London." He read, too, pamphlets and poems on topics of the day, which young, clever, versatile writers were issuing in great numbers. Here he read Chaucer, and Plutarch's great book, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and Holinshed's Chronicles, in which he found the ancient stories of King Lear and Macbeth and Cymbeline. These books and others Shakespeare fixed in his memory, and made their thought his own. He was one who with unerring instinct sought in books that which is human.

Marriage. Our knowledge of Shakespeare's life during the period of boyhood and youth leads us to imagine that he was not merely the dreamy and meditative spectator of life, but rather one who flung himself into its varied experiences with zest and vigor. We are rather led to think of him in these early years as hot