"Secure from worldly chances and mishaps. _There_ lurks no treason, _there_ no envy swells, _There_ grow no damned grudges; _there_ no storms, No noise, but silence and eternal sleep."
Why awaken the slumbering echoes of their living strife?
[Footnote A: _Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker, commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:_--Elegant phraseology, though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which, as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to remark, is there used by the best writers. Akin to it is another mode of expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g., "immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage," meaning, as soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately went upon the stage. As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay, alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid construction to the graces of his style.]
Yet these very law-papers, in the reduplicated folds of which dead quarrels lie embalmed in hideous and grotesque semblance of their living shapes, their lifeblood dried that lent them all their little dignity, their action and their glow, and exhaling only a faint, sickening odor of the venom that has kept them from crumbling into forgetfulness,--these law-papers are now held by some to have special interest Shakespeare-ward, as having to do with a profession for which he made preparatory studies, even if he did not enter upon its practice. Yes, in spite of our alleged ignorance of Shakespeare's life, and especially of the utter darkness which has been thought to rest upon the years which intervened between his marriage in Stratford and his joining the Lord Chamberlain's company of players in London, the question is, now, whether the next historical novel may not begin in this wise:--
At the close of a lovely summer's day, two horsemen might have been seen slowly pacing through the main street of Stratford-on-Avon. Attracting no little attention from the group of loiterers around the market-cross, they passed the White-Lion Inn, and, turning into Henley Street, soon drew their bridles before a goodly cottage built of heavy timbers and standing with one of its peaked gables to the street. On the door was a shingle upon which was painted,