how can he resist the conclusion, that, although the divine Williams may not have run with “Forty,” it is highly probable that he did kill for Keyser?  Let his Lordship also remember that other old tradition, mentioned by Rowe, that John Shakespeare was “a considerable dealer in wool,” and that William, upon leaving school, “seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him”; and remember, also, this passage from another of Shakespeare’s earliest plays:—­

  “He is too picked, too spruce, too affected,
  too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may
  call it...He draweth out the thread of
  his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”
 —­Love’s Labor’s Lost.  Act v.  Sc. 1.

Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler’s craft, as well as of the art of rhetoric, compressed into that one sentence by the hydraulic power of Shakespeare’s genius?  Does it not show that he was initiated in the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, perhaps, his earliest play?  But look again at the following passage, also written when his memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see the evidence that both these traditions were well founded:—­

  “So, first, the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece;
  And, next, his throat unto the butcher’s knife."

Could these lines have been written by a man who had not been both a considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher who killed a calf in high style and made a speech?  Who can have a doubt about this matter, when he appreciates rightly the following passage in “Hamlet,” (Act v.  Sc. 2,) and is penetrated with the wisdom of two wise commentators upon it?—­

  ’Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
  When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
  There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
  Rough-hew them how we will.’

Dr. Farmer informs me that these words are merely technical.  A wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers lately observed to him that his nephew (an idle lad) could only assist him in making them;—­he could rough hew them, but I was obliged to shape their ends!  To shape the ends of wool-skewers, i.e., to point them, requires a degree of skill; any one can rough-hew them.  Whoever recollects the profession of Shakespeare’s father will admit that his son might be no stranger to such terms.  “I have frequently seen packages of wool pinn’d up with skewers.”—­STEEVENS.

Lucky wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers! to furnish at once a comment upon the great philosophical tragedy and a proof that its author and you were both of a trade!  Fortunate Farmer, to have heard the story! and most sagacious Steevens, to have penetrated its hidden meaning, recollecting felicitously that you had seen packages of wool pinn’d up with skewers!  But, O wisest, highest-and-deepest-minded