veritable farmer.  About the time when he was writing Macbeth,[620] he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or excess.  He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers.  I admit the importance of this information.  It is well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

15.  But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us.  We are very clumsy writers of history.  We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well.  It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.  Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier,[621] have wasted their oil.  The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont,[622] have vainly assisted.  Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.  The genius knows them not.  The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.  I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet’s question to the ghost,—­

                            “What may this mean,[625]
    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
    Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world’s dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon.  These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room.  Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream[626] admits me?  Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation?  The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of Scone Castle,[628] the moonlight of Portia’s villa,[629] “the antres vast[630] and desarts idle,” of Othello’s captivity,—­where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor’s