His Life and Genius 1 1 1 



it is true, tell exactly what he ate and drank, at 

 what o'clock he went to bed, what sort of gartered 

 hose he liked best, how many lines of verse he 

 composed at a sitting, in what terms of affection 

 he wrote to his wife at Stratford, if he wrote to 

 her at all, and the like petty particulars which 

 build the bulky masses of present biographies and 

 autobiographies — the real facts striking to the 

 quick and betraying essential character, if not 

 liked, being scrupulously disguised or unscrupu- 

 lously ignored — but we know the principal events 

 and chief aim of his career and the spirit in which 

 he pursued it ; and such history, rightly read, is 

 the disclosure of character. Moreover, his plays 

 and poems contain ample record of his thoughts 

 and feelings concerning men and things. Why 

 crave to know such trivial details, much like the 

 sorry details of any other life — and better not 

 known — which admiring affection minutely re- 

 cords, or itching curiosity, prying through key- 

 holes, delights to discover and disclose ? 



Instructive it no doubt would be to possess a 

 full and exact genealogy of the family stock from 

 which he sprang, and thus from the heritage of 

 ancestral qualities, good or bad, and their com- 

 plexities of composition in marriages, to endeavour 

 to trace and exhibit the general qualities of his 

 character as an ordinary man. For assuredly he, 

 like every other mortal, proceeded by rigorous 

 laws of descent and development from an ancestral 

 line of beings and testified to his stock ; was what 



