Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1898 — SHAKSPEARE IN LONDON. [ARTICLE]

SHAKSPEARE IN LONDON.

Dramatist Must Have Known All Kia Fawoni Contemporaries. Shakspenre’e London was a small city of from 150,000 to 200,000 souls, or about the size of Providence or Minneapolis ait the present time. In cities of such size everybody of the slightest eminence is known all over town, and such persons are sure to be more or less acquainted with one another; it is a very flare exception when it is not so. Before his 30th year Shakspeare was well known in London as an actor, a writer of plays, and the manager of a prominent theater. In that year Spenser, .In his •‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again,” alluding to Shakspeare under the name of Aetlon, or “eagle-like,” paid him this compliment: And there, though last, not least, is Action; A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found; Whose muse full of high thought’s invention Doth, like himself, heroically sound. Four years after this, in 1598, Francis Meres published his book entitled “Palladis Tamla,” a very interesting contribution to literary history. The author, who had been an Instructor in rhetoric in the University of Oxford, was then living in London, near the Globe Theater. In this book Meres tells his readers that “the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends,” etc.

To suppose that such a man as this in a town the size of Minneapolis, connected with a principal theater, writer of the most popular plays of the day, a poet whom men were already coupling with Homer and Pindar—to suppose that such a ttxan was not known to all the educated people of the town is simply absurd. There were probably very few men, women or children in London, between 1595 and IGIO who did not know who Shakspeare was when he passed them in the street; and as for such wits as drank ale and sack at the Mermaid, as fox* Raleigh and Bacon and Selden and the rest, to suppose that Shakspeare did not know them well—nay, to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest wit of those ambrosial nights—is about as sensible as to suppose that he never saw’ a maypole.—John Fiske in Atlantic.

He Got the Dried Apples. The vice president of the Red Cross, American branch, Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, tells an amusing story of “Our T/ddy,” while in Santiago. He appeared before the headquarters one day with a moving request for some delicacies fox* his men. His appeal met with the reception it deserved, and he was promised that the next carload should contain some of the luxuries craved. His meaning had apparently not been grasped, and he hastened to explain that the luxuries nominated in the bond were no other than dried apples, so that the Rough Riders could have some “sass like their mothers used to make.” Much amused the committee promised be should have all the dried apples he could use on the next trainload. Still, he was unsatisfied. He wanted the apples, but he wanted more—he wanted them at once. “But, surely, Colonel Roosevelt, you don’t want to take them yourself.” “Yes, I do,” answered the gallant colonel. The last seen of him he was mounted on a horse galloping to his cavalry, his coat decorated with stripes and “fixins” and over his shoulder a huge bundle of dried apples. The lines between the pathetic and the humorous are often closely drawn as in the present case.—-Crite-rion.