William Shakespeare as He Lived: An Historical Tale

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
As you Like it.
The nature of the following work is sufficiently indicated by the title. In it the most interesting portions of the career of Shakespeare, taken from the best accredited sources, are brought forward in a pleasing narrative, the dialogue being in the style of the Elizabethan period.
Throughout the work the writer has endeavoured, amidst a great deal of stirring incident, and a subordinate tale of much interest, to place the Poet constantly before the reader, whether on or off the scene. The story commences when he was about seventeen years of age, and carries him through some of the eventful chances of that glorious epoch which called forth his own muse of fire, and caused him to ascend the brightest heaven of invention; and, after showing him the sharp uses of adversity, leaves him at the moment of success, whilst Elizabeth and the entire Court-circle are turned to him whose matchless genius has just enchanted them.
It was one morning, during the reign of Elizabeth, that a youth, clad in a grey cloth doublet and hose (the usual costume of the respectable country tradesman or apprentice in England), took his early morning stroll in the vicinity of a small town in Warwickshire.
Lovely as is the scenery in almost every part of this beautiful county, which exhibits, perhaps, the most park-like and truly English picture in our island, it was (at the period of our story) far more beautiful than in its present state or cultivated improvement.
The thick and massive foliage of its woods, in Elizabeth's day, were to be seen in all the luxuriance of their native wildness, unpruned, unthinned, untouched by the hand of man, representing in their bowery beauty the wild uncontrolled woodlands of Britain, when waste, and wold, and swamp, and thicket constituted all.
The fern-clad undulations and forest glades around, too, at this period, were peopled by the wild and herded deer—those poor, dappled fools—the native burghers of the desert city —which, couched in their own confines, their antlered heads alone seen in some sequestered spot amongst the long grass, gave an additional charm to the locality they haunted, in all the freedom of unmolested range, from park to forest, and from glade to thicket.