“You are liberal in offers: 
    You taught me first to beg; and now, methinks,
    You teach me how a beggar should be answered.”

Hardly have they parted than Bassanio repents his seemingly churlish action.  Has not this young man saved his friend from death, and himself from disgrace?  Portia will surely understand that his request could not be refused, and so he sends Gratiano after him with the ring.  Gratiano gives the ring to the lawyer, and the seeming clerk begs Gratiano for his ring, which he, following his friend’s example, gives.

In the last act of the play all the friends are gathered again at Belmont.  After some merry teasing upon the subject of the rings the truth is told, and Bassanio and Gratiano learn that the skillful lawyer and his clerk were none other than their young and clever wives.

BOOKS TO READ

Among the best books of Shakespeare’s stories are:  Stories from Shakespeare, by Jeanie Lang.  The Shakespeare Story-Book, by Mary M’Leod.  Tales from Shakespeare (Everyman’s Library), by C. and M. Lamb.

LIST OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

Histories. — Henry VI (three parts); Richard III; Richard II; King John; Henry IV (two parts); Henry V; Henry VIII (doubtful if Shakespeare’s).

Tragedies. — Titus Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar; Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; Timon of Athens; Antony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus.

Comedies. — Love’s Labour’s Lost; Two Gentlemen of Verona; Comedy of Errors; Merchant of Venice; Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; All’s Well that Ends Well; Merry Wives of Windsor; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night; Troilus and Cressida; Measure for Measure; Pericles; Cymbeline; The Tempest; A Winter’s Tale.

Chapter XLVIII JONSON—­“EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR”

OF all the dramatists who were Shakespeare’s friends, of those who wrote before him, with him, and just after him, we have little room to tell.  But there is one who stands almost as far above them all as Shakespeare stands above him.  This is Ben Jonson, and of him we must speak.

Ben Jonson’s life began in poverty, his father dying before he was born, and leaving his widow poorly provided for.  When Ben was about two years old his mother married again, and this second husband was a bricklayer.  Ben, however, tells us that his own father was a gentleman, belonging to a good old Scottish Border family, and that he had lost all his estates in the reign of Queen Mary.  But about the truth of this we do not know, for Ben was a bragger and a swaggerer.  He may not have belonged to this Scottish family, and he may have had no estates to lose.  Ben first went to a little school at St. Martin’s-in-the-fields in London.  There, somehow, the second master of Westminster School came to know of him, became his friend, and took him to Westminster, where he paid for his schooling.  But when Ben left school he had to earn a living in some way, so he became a bricklayer like his step-father, when “having a trowell in his hand he had a book in his pocket."*