And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men--poets and dramatists--who belonged to his time, and who--with a pleasant egoism--let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family “wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless--aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted--to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of _him_; he ran out of sight of them all. He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born--his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers--whether in wool, meats, or gloves--and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family--in the female line[13]--toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;--hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them; wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges