Shakespeare,[1] by general suffrage, is the greatest name in
literature. There can be no extravagance in saying, that to all who
speak the English language his genius has made the world better worth
living in, and life a nobler and diviner thing. And even among those
who do not "speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake," large numbers
are studying the English language mainly for the purpose of being at
home with him. How he came to be what he was, and to do what he did,
are questions that can never cease to be interesting, wherever his
works are known, and men's powers of thought in any fair measure
developed. But Providence has left a veil, or rather a cloud, about
his history, so that these questions are not likely to be
satisfactorily answered.

[1] Much discussion has been had in our time as to the right way
of spelling the Poet's name. The few autographs of his that are
extant do not enable us to decide positively how he wrote his
name; or rather they show that he had no one constant way of
writing it. But the _Venus and Adonis_ and the _Lucrece_ were
unquestionably published by his authority, and in the
dedications of both these poems the name is printed
"Shakespeare." The same holds in all the quarto issues of his
plays where the author's name is given, with the one exception
of _Love's Labour's Lost_, which has it "Shakespere"; as it also
holds in the folio. And in very many of these cases the name is
printed with a hyphen, "Shake-speare," as if on purpose that
there might be no mistake about it. All which, surely, is or
ought to be decisive as to how the Poet willed his name to be
spelt in print. Inconstancy in the spelling of names was very