Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant; this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the _idiom_ of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When _he_ came to London, and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke--the language of his own fireside! As a matter of fact, _English_, was a much rarer accomplishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those days, were put at their hic, hæc, hoc at an age when we {042}send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it in those crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger London, he had an opportunity to study Lyly, Nash, Greene, Peele, Chettle, and the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary--like the whole canon of the plays--is a thing apart--unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any of these. _These_ were satisfied to write for the stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences, which--according to all reports--were decidedly indifferent as to scholarship. _These_ might introduce a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to make him French; or a Scotchman, but they never stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet; or of that crafty Italian, named Iago; or of that Roman iceberg, Brutus--it is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of fortune--with leisure to study the characteristics of race and nationality--as acquiring all the grandeur of dic{043}tion, insight into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the "Venus and Adonis"--appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might even assume--how could that poem have