make a memorandum of, lest we should forget it.  Meantime, we are busy at the theatre with rehearsals, changes of performance, bill-printing, and a hundred thousand similar matters that must be each day disposed of.  But we keep our newly-thought-of play in mind at odd intervals, good things occur to us as we are walking in the street, and we begin to long to be at it.  The opening scenes we have quite clearly in our eye, and we almost know the whole; or it may be, vice versa, that we work out the last scenes first; at all events, we have them hewn out in the rough, so that we work the first with an intention of making them conform to a something which is to succeed; and we are so sure of our course that we have no dread of the something after,—­nothing to puzzle the will, or make us think too precisely on the event.  Such is the condition of mind in which we finally begin our labor.  Some Wednesday afternoon in a holiday-week, when the theatres are closed, we find ourselves sitting at a desk before a sea-coal fire in a quaintly panelled rush-strewn chamber, the pen in our hand, nibbed with a “Rogers’s” pen-knife, [A] and the blank page beneath it.

[Footnote A:  “A Shefeld thwitel bare he in his hose.”—­Chaucer. The Reve’s Tale.]

We desire the reader to close his eyes for a moment and endeavor to fancy himself in the position of William Shakspeare about to write a piece,—­the play abovenamed.  This may be attempted without presumption.  We wish to recall and make real the fact that our idol was a man, subject to the usual circumstances of men living in his time, and to those which affect all men at all times,—­that he had the same round of day and night to pass through, the same common household accidents which render “no man a hero to his valet.”  The world was as real to him as it is to us.  The dreamy past, of two hundred and fifty years since, was to him the present of one of the most stirring periods in history, when wonders were born quite as frequently as they are now.

And having persuaded the reader to place himself in Shakspeare’s position, we will make one more very slight request, which is, that he will occupy another chair in the same chamber and fancy that he sees the immortal dramatist begin a work,—­still keeping himself so far in his position that he can observe the workings of his mind as he writes.

Shakspeare has fixed upon a name for his piece, and he writes it,—­he that the players told Ben Jonson “never blotted a line.”  It is the tragedy,—­

Timon of Athens.

He will have it in five acts, as the best form; and he has fixed upon his dramatis personae, at least the principal of them, for he names them on the margin as he writes.  He uses twelve in the first scene, some of whom he has no occasion for but to bring forward the character of his hero; but they are all individualized while he employs them.  The scene he has fixed upon; this is present to his mind’s eye; and as he cannot afterwards alter it without making his characters talk incongruously and being compelled to rewrite the whole, he writes it down thus:—­