The whole audience, led by Southampton, Essex, Bacon and Drayton gave three cheers and a lion roar for "Julius Cæsar," the greatest historical and classical play ever composed, and destined to run down the ages for a million years!
CHAPTER XIII.
TWO TRAMPS. BY LAND AND SEA.
"Travelers must be content."
"Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."
The translation of Petrarch, Plutarch, Tacitus, Terence, and particularly Homer, by Chapman, gave a great impulse to dramatic writers, and inspired a feverish desire to travel through classic lands where classic authors lived and died.
Shakspere was a natural bohemian, and while he could conform to the conventionalities of society, he was never more pleased than when mixing with the variegated mass of mankind, where vice and virtue predominated without the guilt of hypocrisy to blur and blast the principles of sincerity.
Art, fashion and human laws he knew to be often only blinds for the concealment of plastic iniquity, and were secretly purchased by the few who had the gold to buy.
By sinking the grappling iron of independent investigation into every form and phase of human life, he plucked from the deepest ocean of adversity the rarest shells, weeds and flowers of thought, and spread them before the world as a new revelation.