shape, before the close of 1604. Reckoning, then, the four last named,
we have twenty-eight of the plays written when the Poet was forty
years of age, and had probably been at the work about eighteen years.
Time has indeed left few traces of the process; but what a magnificent
treasure of results! If Shakespeare had done no more, he would have
stood the greatest intellect of the world. How all alive must those
eighteen years have been with intense and varied exertion! His quick
discernment, his masterly tact, his grace of manners, his practical
judgment, and his fertility of expedients, would needs make him the
soul of the establishment; doubtless the light of his eye and the life
of his hand were in all its movements and plans. Besides, the compass
and accuracy of information displayed in his writings prove him to
have been, for that age, a careful and voluminous student of books.
Portions of classical and of continental literature were accessible to
him in translations. Nor are we without strong reasons for believing
that, in addition to his "small Latin and less Greek," he found or
made time to form a tolerable reading acquaintance with Italian and
French. Chaucer, too, "the day-star," and Spenser, "the sunrise," of
English poetry, were pouring their beauty round his walks. From all
these, and from the growing richness and abundance of contemporary
literature, his all-gifted and all-grasping mind no doubt greedily
took in and quickly digested whatever was adapted to please his taste,
or enrich his intellect, or assist his art.

I have mentioned the Poet's purchase of New Place at Stratford in
1597. Thenceforward he kept making other investments from time to
time, some of them pretty large, the records of which have lately come
to light. It appears by a subsidy roll of 1598, that he was assessed
on property valued at £5 13s. 4d, in the parish of St. Helen's,
Bishopsgate, London. In May, 1602, was executed a deed of conveyance