Thus, from his teaching at school, from his wide reading, from bright and varied conversation, from assiduous exercise, Shakespeare derived perpetual education. If, as Bacon declares, "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man," then Shakespeare was trebly well equipped. But there was another element in his training, which, for the dramatist, was worth all the rest. This was his habit of observation, an observation shrewd but sympathetic, of all sorts and conditions of men. The experience lying between his youthful escapades at Stratford and his sober retirement thither was doubtless a wonderful polychrome. He had plodded his way among many peculiar folk as he passed from Warwickshire to London by way of Banbury or Oxford. He had stopped at inns in strange company of fools and knaves, pedlars, roisterers and swashbucklers. He had hobnobbed with dull-pated village constables. He had consorted with Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernel. In London he had foregathered with Mrs. Quickly and haply with Doll Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, tread the primrose path which leads down to futility and death. He was always pre-eminently sane. While composing his transcendent _Lear_ and _Othello_, he was suing Philip Rogers for L1 15s. 10d. While his fancy roamed in the fairyland of _Midsummer Night's Dream_, his investments were in the highest degree judicious. Elizabethan life, whether in town or country, whether among earls or tapsters, was infinitely more frank, varied, and picturesque than it can ever be again. Men and women displayed more freely their natural idiosyncrasies. Nor did the traveller rush at fifty miles an hour through all this variegated world. He saw it lingeringly and intimately, as Chaucer saw his Pilgrims, or Goldsmith his Village, or Scott his Border peasants.