Picture young Shakespeare hand in hand with gentle Anne Hathaway, in their walks in the unfrequented paths of Shottery and Stratford, charming her mind with the poetry of his nature, the glow of admiration deepening into love for her youthful suitor; the bridegroom standing at the altar assuming the responsibilities of marriage before nineteen years had passed over his head, and the pride of paternity when his first child was born; and realize the sense of importance of the departure of the youthful husband and father for London. Whether to better his fortunes or to escape from the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy after his unlucky escapade on that worthy gentleman’s estate at Charlecote, matters not. These I conceive to be some of the factors in the formation of the mind and character of William Shakespeare: a mother’s gentle influence, a fair mental development at school, an early appreciation of the vicissitudes of fortune and the necessities of labor, a love of nature developed by the surroundings of his youth, a remarkable capacity of observation, and an experience of the sacred mystery of love, marriage and paternity ere he had arrived at years of mature manhood; and they do not appear to be at all incompatible with the life, the knowledge, the friendships, the accomplishments and the genius which the world has conceded to this great and glorious man. THE MASQUERADER. By Katherine Cecil Thurston. Grasp and constructive ability are the two attributes of genius or of talent absolutely necessary to a novelist. When Katherine Cecil Thurston grasped the results that bound together those two incidents of January twenty-third, incidents so widely different in character, she created novelistic material. To this material she applied the same constructive ability, but maturer, that she evidenced in “The Circle.” And from the first statement in her book, that these incidents were bound by results, the reader’s interest does not flag till the last phase of the complicated result is clearly given, as it is in the final statement of the final chapter. Nor then, for it is a book to hold after it is closed, while the mind reverts to its scenes and its interest in pleasant retrospect. Self-accusation may follow analysis of the book, for, after all, nothing is actually acquired in the reading. The aggressive, acquisitive attitude of Russia, which is the one historical episode of the novel, has been made so much clearer and so much more forcible in the last twelve months than a mere statement or even a masterful speech can make it that the book is not worth reading for this episode.