servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of Eton and
Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school.
They prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he
thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and
regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill
luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This
is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not
a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of
arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural
position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.



This Side Idolatry

There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder. He
says that Shakespear was but "little esteemed by his own generation."
He even describes Jonson's description of his "little Latin and less
Greek" as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy
of Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant to
heighten the impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments
by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements.
Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was
too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that,
by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent's Canal do
not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to
chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some
reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in
my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a
popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But