of all time that compassionate sympathy which goes out to those whose
burdens are almost greater than they can bear.




II.


The meagre information we have as to the life and habits of Shakespeare
would seem to make it an almost hopeless task now to discover the causes
of his insomnia. He wrote a marvellous body of literature, and it might
be thought this labor itself would suffice as an explanation: that the
furnace heat in which the conceptions of Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear
were wrought in the crucible of his brain would be fatal to repose. But
his contemporaries speak of him as an easy and rapid writer; one whose
imagination is only paralleled by the ease, the force and beauty of the
phrase in which it is embodied. We are told, too, by Dr. H.A. Johnson,
an eminent medical authority, in the second volume of his treatise on
the pathology of the optic nerve, that it is not work, even heavy and
continuous, but worry over this work, which drives away repose and
shortens life.

I had observed, in collating the many passages in Shakespeare concerning
sleep, that the greater number, and those bearing evidence of deepest
earnestness, occurred in six plays: "Richard III.," "Macbeth," "1 Henry
IV.," "Hamlet," "2 Henry IV.," and "Henry V." The chronology of
Shakespeare's plays seems almost hopeless, scarcely any two writers
agreeing as to the order of the plays or the years in which they were
written. Several of the most critical authorities, however,--Dyce,