But, even if "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth," and "Julius Cæsar" could have been produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, (so that the author's first draft should be the acting copy for the players), they could have hardly been composed, nowadays, without a library. And even had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia (such as were first invented two hundred years or so after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. They can not be studied as they are capable of being {267}studied--as they were found capable of being studied by Coleridge and Gervinus--without a library. And yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed without one?--in the days when such a thing as a dictionary even was unknown! Who ever heard of William Shakespeare in his library, pulling down volumes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the expense of Greece and Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern romance--for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in blankets? It is always interesting to read of the habitudes of authors--of paper-saving Pope scribbling his "Iliad" on the backs of old correspondence, of Spenser by his fireside in his library at Kilcolman Castle, of Scott among his dogs, of Gibbon biting at the peaches that hung on the trees in his garden at Lausanne, of Schiller declaiming by mountain brook-sides and in forest paths, of Goldsmith in his garrets and his jails. Even of Chaucer, dead and buried before Shakespeare saw the light, we read of his studies at Cambridge, his call to the bar, and his chambers in the Middle Temple. But of William Shakespeare--after ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record--save and except the statement of Ben Jonson how he had heard the actor's anecdote about his never blotting his lines--not a word, not a breath, can be found to connect him with, or surprise him in any agency or employment as to the composition of the plays we {268}insist upon calling his--much less to the possession of a single book! Did William Shakespeare own a library? Had we found this massive draught upon antiquity in the remains of an immortal Milton or a mortal Tupper, or in all the range of letters between, we should not have failed to presume a library. Why should we believe that William Shakespeare needed none?--that, as his pen ran, he never paused to lift volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his marvelously retentive recollection? There was no Astor or Mercantile Library around the corner from the Globe or the Blackfriars, in those days. And, as for his own possessions, he leaves in his Will no hint of book or library, much less of the literature the booksellers had taken