rural communities, as we {075}have remarked, than a reputation for "book-learning;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's. When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean drama--first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will. But the statement is the nearest and best evidence {076}we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.