He is instant and decisive with his reasons. “To ask me,” he continues, “to believe that a man who was famous for a variety of other accomplishments, whose life was divided between public business, the practice of a laborious profession, and private study of the art of investigating the material laws of nature--a man of large acquaintance, of note from early manhood, and one of the busiest men of his time, but who was never suspected of wasting his time in writing poetry, and is not known to have written a single blank verse in all his life--that this man was the author of fourteen comedies, ten historical plays, and eleven tragedies, exhibiting the greatest, and the greatest variety, of excellence that has been attained in that kind of composition, is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author, not only of Dickens’s novels, but of Thackeray’s also, and of Tennyson’s poems besides.” Spedding, himself a genius, finds no difficulty in appreciating the quality of genius in Shakespeare. It was not scholarship, or environment, or training that enabled William Shakespeare to become the author of the most wonderful series of dramas in the world. Of Shakespeare’s gifts, he frankly states the wonder is that any man should have possessed them, not that the man to whose lot they fell was the son of a poor man called John Shakespeare, and that he was christened William. If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar, or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties (which nature bestows as fully on the poor as on the rich) you will find that the required knowledge, art and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply, were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation, and had nothing else to do.” [Illustration: ANN HATHAWAY’S COTTAGE AT SHOTTERY.]