his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same Galen and Paracelsus? * Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why-should he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity? See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1--"O, spite, too old to be engaged to young!" etc. Again--"Too old, by Heaven! Let still the woman take an elder than herself." Again--"Then let thy love be younger than thyself," etc., etc. ("Twelfth Night," Act II., Scene 4.) It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried perusal in the green-room."--Chambers's Journal, August 7, 1852,p. 89. Newton, who was only born in 1642--twenty years after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb--surely need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal the immutable truth of gravitation. He had but to take down his copy of "Troilus and Cressida" (printed in 1606) to open to the law itself, as literally stated as he himself could have formulated it:= ```"_Cressida._... But the strong base and building of my love ```Is as the very center of the earth, ```Drawing all things to it." ````--_Troilus and Cressida, Act IV., Scene 2._= Are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing them "without blotting out a line," and sending the "copy" to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the stage on the following evening? What a library it was--that library up among the flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Theater! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have been, to have snatched from his overworked life--from the interval between the night's performance and the {213}morning's routine--the hours to labor over Galen and Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek! It was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge, in the nineteenth century--surrounded with libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing--could have mastered all the known languages. But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms at Stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at Stratford School, or at the University of Oxford--for there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as that he was at Stratford school) _without_ books, since there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!