and from that to writing plays of his own, which are now universally recognized as the greatest productions of human genius. His authorship enabled him to buy shares in the theatre, and hẹ was very soon a prosperous man, able, when he went home to see his children, his father, his brothers and sisters, to take with him something substantial for their comfort. He never removed his family to London, but visited them frequently, and invested money in Stratford, when he had any to spare from his business as manager of a theatre.

In ten years after leaving home he bought one of the handsomest houses in Stratford for the residence of his family, and was decidedly the most distinguished literary man of Great Britain. His great plays attracted immense multitudes of spectators and excited unbounded enthusiasm. Many passages could be quoted (I have them now before me) from writers of his own time, in which Shakespeare is ranked with the greatest dramatists of Greece, Rome, and France. Those who think that this poet was not keenly appreciated and bountifully re warded in his own day are utterly mistaken. Fame and wealth were his to his heart's desire. Among other tributes to his genius was one from a rogue who impudently put the name of Shakespeare upon the title-page of a book to make it sell.

When he had been sixteen years in London, he ceased to act. This was in 1603. In 1607 his eldest daughter, Susanna, was married to a physician, Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, and in the same year Edmund Shakespeare, a brother of the poet, and an obscure actor in his theatre, died in London.

Shakespeare lived in the metropolis, as actor, dramatist, and manager, for twenty-four years, and then retired to his native town upon an income equal, in our present currency, to ten thousand dollars per annum. That is to say, his income was about four hundred and ten pounds per annum, which is equal to two thousand pounds in money of the present time, which is equal to more than ten thousand dollars in greenbacks. After settling in Stratford he wrote three plays, of which one was the sublime and pleasing Tempest. His parents and his son were dead, and there is good reason to believe that from his twenty-first year he had never been a husband to his wife, and really had no home.

He died suddenly in 1616, aged fifty-two, leaving his wife and two married daughters. Both of his daughters had children, and one of them a grandchild; but before the close of the century the family had become extinct. He had no heir, either to his estate or to his genius. He was, in all probability, the first of his family who ever knew how to write, and he carried the art of writing to a point which no man, in all the future of the human race, will ever be likely to surpass.

Because a man is a very great poet or artist is not a reason for supposing that he is a great man. On the contrary, a person may have the most wonderful talents, and yet be an exceedingly inferior human being, - mean, grasping, sensual, and false. We do not know enough of the man, William Shakespeare, to judge of his character with certainty, though I think the little we do know indicates that he had his share of human infirmity. But when we come to consider him as an artist and poet, we feel that it is presumption even to praise him; and, for my part, I consider that I am more indebted to him than to any other creature that ever trod this earth.

JOHN HOWARD.

NOVEMBER the 1st, 1755, the people of Lisbon were alarmed by that awful rumbling beneath the earth which, as they well knew, usually preceded an earthquake. Before they could escape from their houses, the shock came, which overthrew the greater part of the city, and buried thousands of persons in its ruins. The sea retired, leaving the bottom of the harbor bare, but immediately returned in a fearful wave fifty feet high, overwhelming everything in its course. The inhabitants who could get clear of the ruins rushed in thousands to a magnificent marble wharf, just completed, which seemed to offer a place of safety. This massive structure, densely covered with men, women, and children, suddenly sunk, bearing with it to unknown depths the entire multitude. Not a creature escaped; not a human body rose again to the surface; not a fragment of anything that was on the wharf was ever again seen by human eye; and when, by and by, the water was sounded over the place where it had stood, the depth was found to be six hundred feet. Within the space of six minutes, sixty thousand persons are supposed to have perished; and those who survived were so encompassed about with horror, that they might well have envied those whom the sea had submerged or the falling houses crushed.

Not Lisbon alone, but all Portugal, was shaken by this tremendous convulsion, which was felt, indeed, over a third part of the earth. The same shock which almost destroyed Lisbon shook down chimneys in Massachusetts and jarred the habitations in Iceland. But it was in Portugal that its force was chiefly spent. There, mountains were rent, towns engulfed, farms moved away in a mass, rivers turned from their course,

the whole land desolated, and all the inhabitants paralyzed with terror. When the earthquake had subsided, fires broke out in the prostrated towns, and bands of robbers, in the total suspension of government, ravaged and plundered the helpless people, and committed every kind of abominable excess. During all that winter the sufferings of the people were grievous, and to this day Portugal has not recovered from the stroke.

Such an event, at any time, would have excited universal consternation, and called forth a great deal of remark; but there were some circumstances peculiar to that period which caused it to come with special power upon reflecting minds. The fashionable philosophy then was that of Pope's Essay on Man, which had been translated into French and German, and was continually quoted in society. It was very common to hear such expressions as, "Whatever is is right;""Partial evil is the general good;" "This is the best of possible worlds;" Each creature is as happy as is consistent with the happiness of the whole." Sentiments of this kind we now call " Optimism." In the midst of all this shallow talk, came the tidings of an appalling catastrophe, which struck every soul with amazement and terror, as if to show the futility of all human attempts to form a consistent theory respecting the government of the universe. The youthful Goethe and the aged Voltaire have both left records in their works of the effect of the Lisbon earthquake upon the glib praters of Optimism, as well as of the universal and long-continued horror which it excited in the public mind.

It was this catastrophe which was the means of calling into exercise the latent benevolence of John Howard, who is now styled in all lands and tongues, "the philanthropist."

The father of this benevolent being was noted for his penuriousness. He was a member of the firm of Howard and Hamilton, upholsterers and carpet-dealers, who, for fifty years or more, supplied the fashionable people of London with their wares. In this business, Mr. Howard (who was also named John) acquired a very handsome fortune; so that, beside leaving a liberal independence to his only daughter, he bequeathed to his only son a fine landed estate, two country houses, a house

in London, and seven thousand pounds sterling in money. So penurious was he in his old age, that he permitted his houses to get out of repair to such a degree that it cost his son, on coming into possession, a large sum to render them comfortable. His avarice, however, did not prevent him sending his son to the best schools the dissenters then had in England; but as the teachers in those schools were selected, not for their fitness, but for their creed, they were not always very capable of calling forth the energies of the youthful mind. John Howard, therefore, was a decidedly illiterate man. He spelled very incorrectly, and expressed himself, on paper, in the most awkward and ungrammatical manner. He was, probably, a dull boy, as he was rather a dull man. There is no question that, in point of mere intellect, he was not much above the average of English tradesmen.

It was the custom at that day for the sons of tradesmen, no matter how rich their fathers might be, to be regularly apprenticed for seven years to some business. Young Howard was apprenticed to a great firm of wholesale grocers, to whom his father paid seven hundred pounds premium. In consideration of this large sum, the apprentice was treated like a younger son of the head partner. He was allowed to keep a man-servant and two saddle-horses; he rode in the park like a lord; he took his rides into the country; his pockets had plenty of money in them; and, in short, he was such a grocer's apprentice as the modern world knows nothing about, but whose pranks may be read of in some old books. This particular apprentice, however, was a very serious youth. His father had reared him in the strictest principles of the Calvinistic dissenters, and the boy appears to have imbibed those principles heartily, and lived in accordance with them from his childhood up. He was guilty of none of the excesses common to young men of that day, and to which his circumstances appeared to invite him. At an early period he joined a dissenting church, with which he remained connected through life. In matters of mere doctrine he was moderate and very tolerant, while his conduct was regulated in the most rigid conformity with his profession. Under a quiet