54 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters . 
ing discreditable in the circumstances of his marriage/’ and that 
“even the bequest of his second-best bed was a token of affec¬ 
tion, not of indifference.” Stratford holds fast to his tradi¬ 
tionary song on Ann Hathaway: 
She hath a way so to controll 
To rapture the imprisoned soul 
And sweetest heaven on earth display 
That to be heaven she hath a way 
To be heaven’s self she hath a way. 
Few can walk through the Shakespearian gallery of true 
lovers without assurance that so consummate a painter must 
have been at some time himself imparadised in that purest of 
passions. There may be a cryptic spelling of his name in Dor- 
icles who speaks out to P'erdita the heart of every true lover, as 
no other words can, and whether she speak, or sing or dance, so 
crowns what she’s doing in the present deed that all her acts 
are queens,—and that, too, queens created of every creature’s 
best. 
As the growing dramatist learned language from living voices 
in childhood and upward, it was natural for him to push on 
in the same linguistic training to the end. His persistence 
in this self-educaton was favored by the new and cosmopolitan 
companionships in London, by his annual pedestrian visits to 
his birthplace for so many years, and vet more by the itinerary 
of his theatrical troupe in a score of provincial centers, which 
Phillipps was first to discover. 
The ample interchange of sweet discourse in all varieties of 
many-colored life which thus became inevitable, may best ac¬ 
count for the ultimate perfection in style of his latest dramas 
in comparison with his earliest. This consummation is an ad¬ 
vancement so mjarvelous that critics call it “another morn risen 
on mid-noon.” But this life-long linguistic progress, Time, who 
stands still for no man, now forbids me to speak of at all. 
Entrance into London was epoch-making for the fugitive. 
It taught him that, while having nothing, he was possessing 
all things. From a child his genius had been a discerner of 
spirits and unlocked character with a master-key. But so long 
as it lacked interpreting words, his genius—yes, his tongue, was 
