help us to the knowledge of Shakespeare’s life, of what he did for himself, thought for himself, how he joyed, how he suffered, what he was?  Would it help us to know what the Stratford boys thought of him and felt toward him who was to write “Lear” and “Hamlet,” or how the men of London regarded him who was a-writing them?  Not a whit.  To prove the fact would merely satisfy sheer aimless, fruitless curiosity; and it is a source of some reasonable satisfaction to know that the very people who would be most interested in the perusal of a biography of Shakespeare made up of the relation of such facts are they who have least right to know anything about him.  Of the hundreds of thousands of people who giggled through their senseless hour at the “American Cousin,”—­a play which, in language, in action, in character, presents no semblance to human life or human creatures, as they are found on any spot under the canopy, and which seems to have been written on the model of the Interlude of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “for, in all the play, there is not one word apt, one player fitted,”—­of the people to whom this play owed its monstrous success, and who, for that very reason, it is safe to say, think Shakespeare a bore on the stage and off it, a goodly number would eagerly buy and read a book that told them when he went to bed and what he had for breakfast, and would pay a ready five-cent piece for a picture of him as he appeared in the attorney’s office, to preserve as a companion to the equally veritable “portrait of the Hon. Daniel E. Sickles, as he appeared in prison.”  Nay, it must be confessed, that there are some Shakespearean enthusiasts ever dabbling and gabbling about what they call Shakespeariana, who would give more for the pen with which he engrossed a deed or wrote “Hamlet,” than for the ability to understand, better than they do or ever can, what he meant by that mysterious tragedy.  Biography has its charms and its uses; but it is not by what we know of their bare external facts that

  “Lives of great men all remind us
  We can make our lives sublime,
  And departing leave behind us
  Footprints on the sands of time.”

What the readers of Shakespeare, who are worthy to know aught of him, long to know, would have been the same, had he been bred lawyer, physician, soldier, or sailor.  It is of his real life, not of its mere accidents, that they crave a knowledge; and of that life, it is to be feared, they will remain forever ignorant, unless he himself has written it.

THE MINISTER’S WOOING.

[Continued.]

CHAPTER XVI.

We suppose the heroine of a novel, among other privileges and immunities, has a prescriptive right to her own private boudoir, where, as a French writer has it, “she appears like a lovely picture in its frame.”

Well, our little Mary is not without this luxury, and to its sacred precincts we will give you this morning a ticket of admission.  Know, then, that the garret of this gambrel-roofed cottage had a projecting window on the seaward side, which opened into an immensely large old apple-tree, and was a look-out as leafy and secluded as a robin’s nest.