If we are to take it for granted that after the year 1597, when he bought one of the best houses in his native town for his residence, Shakespeare spent his life there, except during the theatrical season, the greater part of his last nineteen years would be passed in the quiet of his country home. We may then settle his _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Love's Labours Lost_, _All's Well that Ends Well_, _Richard II._ and _Richard III._, _King John_, _Titus Andronicus_ (if his), the first part of _Henry IV._, and _Romeo and Juliet_, as produced in the bustle of his London life. But the far greater part, and the most magnificent and poetical, of his dramas were composed in the pleasant retirement of his native scenes; namely, the second part of _Henry IV._, _Henry V._, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, and _The Merchant of Venice_, in 1598 and 1600; the second and third parts of _Henry VI._, _Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1601; _Hamlet_, 1602; _Lear_, 1608; _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Pericles_, 1609; _Othello_ (not published till after the author's death, which was the case, too, with all his other plays, though brought on the stage in his lifetime), _The Winter's Tale_, _As You Like It_, _King Henry VIII._, _Measure for Measure_, _Cymbeline_, _Macbeth_, _The Taming of the Shrew_, _Julius Cæsar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Coriolanus_, _Timon of Athens_, _The Tempest_, and _Twelfth Night_. Shakespeare died in 1616. Of the envy which the unexampled splendour of Shakespeare's genius produced amongst inferior dramatic writers, we have an amusing specimen in the words of Robert Greene: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only _Shakscene_ in a country."