To the ardent and opening mind of our youthful Bard what exquisite delight must this grand festival have imparted, the splendour of which, as Bishop Hurd remarks, "claims a remembrance even in the annals of our country."[39:B] A considerable portion of the very mythology which he had just been studying at school, was here brought before his eyes, of which the costume and language were under the direction of the first poets of the age; and the dramatic cast of the whole pageantry, whether classical or Gothic, was such, as probably to impress his glowing imagination with that bias for theatrical amusements, which afterwards proved the basis of his own glory, and of his country's poetic fame. Here, could he revisit the glimpses of the day, how justly might he deplore, in his own inimitable language, the havoc of time, and the mutability of human grandeur; of this princely castle, once the seat of feudal hospitality, of revelry and song, and of which Laneham, in his quaint style and orthography, has observed,—"Who that considerz untoo the stately seat of _Kenelworth Castl_, the rare beauty of bilding that His Honor hath avaunced; all of the hard quarry-stone: every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so hy roofed within; so seemly too sight by du proportion without; a day tyme, on every side so glittering by glasse; a night, by continuall brightnesse of candel, fyre, and torch-light, transparent thro the lyghtsome wyndow, as it wear the _Egiptian Pharos_ relucent untoo all the _Alexandrian_ coast: or els (too talke merily with my mery freend) thus radiant, as thoogh _Phœbus_ for hiz eaz woold rest him in the _Castl_, and not every night so to travel doown untoo the _Antipodes_; heertoo so fully furnisht of rich apparell and utensilez apted in all points to the best;"[40:A] of this vast pile the very ruins are now so reduced, that the grand gateway, and the banquetting hall, eighty-six feet in length, and forty-five in width, are the only important remains.[40:B] If Shakspeare were taken as early from school as we have supposed, and his slender attainments in latinity strongly warrant the supposition, it is more than probable, building on the traditional hint in Rowe, of his aid being _wanted at home_[42:A], that he continued to assist his father in the wool-trade for some years; that is, in all likelihood, until his sixteenth or eighteenth year. Mr. Malone, however, not adverting to this tradition, has, in a note to Rowe's Life, declared his belief, "that, _on leaving school_, Shakspeare was placed in the office of some country attorney, or the seneschal of some manor court[43:A]:" a position which we think improbable only in _point of time_; and, in justice to Mr. Malone, it must be added, that in other places he has given a much wider latitude to the period of this engagement.