"He had," says this genial biographer, "a copy, well thumbed from his first reading days, of 'The Palace of Pleasure, beautified, adorned, and well furnished with pleasant histories and excellent novelles, selected out of divers good and commendable authors; by William Painter, Clarke of the Ordinaunce and Armarie.' In this book, according to the dedication of the translator to Ambrose Earl of Warwick, was set forth 'the great valiance of noble gentlemen, the terrible combats of courageous personages, the virtuous minds of noble dames, the chaste hearts of constant ladies, the wonderful patience of puissant princes, the mild sufferance of well-disposed gentlewomen, and, in divers, the quiet bearing of adverse fortune.' Pleasant little apothegms and short fables were there in the book; which the brothers and sisters of William Shakespeare had heard him tell with marvellous spirit, and they abided therefore in their memories. There was Æsop's fable of the old lark and her young ones, wherein 'he prettily and aptly doth premonish that hope and confidence of things attempted by man ought to be fixed and trusted in none other but himself.' There was the story, most delightful to a child, of the bondman at Rome, who was brought into the open place upon which a great multitude looked, to fight with a lion of a marvellous bigness; and the fierce lion, when he saw him, 'suddenly stood still, and afterwards by little and little, in gentle sort, he came unto the man as though he had known him,' and licked his hands and legs; and the bondman told that he had healed in former time the wounded foot of the lion, and the beast became his friend. These were for the younger children; but William had now a new tale, out of the same storehouse, upon which he had often pondered, the subject of which had shaped itself in his mind into dialogue that almost sounded like verse in his graceful and earnest recitation. It was a tale which Painter translated from the French of Pierre Boisteau.... It was 'The goodly history of the true and constant love between Romeo and Julietta.' ... From the same collection of tales had the youth before half dramatized the story of 'Giletta of Narbonne,' who cured the King of France of a painful malady, and the king gave her in marriage to the Count Beltramo, with whom she had been brought up, and her husband despised and forsook her, but at last they were united, and lived in great honor and felicity.