Those who have heard Robert Mantell in Lear, Richard III, Hamlet or Iago can form some idea of the vitality and the essential modernism of Shakespeare's work. The good actor or the good stage manager cuts out the coarse and the stupid lines that may be found in all Shakespeare's plays. The remainder reaches a height of poetic beauty, keen insight into human nature and dramatic perfection which no modern work even approaches. Take an unlettered spectator who may never have heard Shakespeare's name and he soon becomes thrall to the genius of this great Elizabethan wizard, whose master hand reaches across the centuries and moves him to laughter and tears. The only modern who can claim a place beside him is Goethe, whose _Faust_, whether in play or in opera, has the same deathless grip on the sympathies of an audience. And yet in taking up Shakespeare the reader who has no guide is apt to stumble at the threshold and retire without satisfaction. As arranged, the comedies are given first, and it is not well to begin with Shakespeare's comedies. In reading any author it is the part of wisdom to begin with his best works. Our knowledge of Shakespeare is terribly meager, but we know that he went up to London from his boyhood home at Stratford-on-Avon, that he secured work in a playhouse, and that very soon he began to write plays. To many this sudden development of a raw country boy into a successful dramatist seems incredible. [Illustration: CHANDOS' PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE SO CALLED BECAUSE IT WAS OWNED BY THE DUKE OF CHANDOS--PROBABLY PAINTED AFTER DEATH FROM PERSONAL DESCRIPTION THE ORIGINAL IS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON] Yet a similar instance is afforded by Alexander Dumas, the greatest imaginative writer of his time, and the finest story-teller in all French literature. Dumas had little education, and his work, when he went to Paris from his native province, was purely clerical, yet he read very widely, and the novels and romances of Scott aroused his imagination. But who taught Dumas the perfect use of French verse? Who gave him his prose style as limpid and flowing as a country brook? These things Dumas doesn't think it necessary to explain in his voluminous memoirs. They are simply a part of that literary genius which is the despair of the writer who has not the gift of style or the power to move his readers by creative imagination.