Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in that order. Genius, like every other good gift and every perfect gift, "is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains." Brains have been classified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air. By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly, foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonishing degree. They were also full of windows. His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a manifoldness, or rather, totality of them. In a different branch of art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses, paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men. If we analyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her "darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays each in its highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more misplaced. This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an unassailable verdict upon the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord among the competent--the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than she was to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford town.