Shakespeare, to have remembered, as you were propounding, Hamlet-wise, one of the great unsolvable mysteries of life, the skewers that you, being an idle lad, could but rough-hew, leaving to your careful father the skill-requiring task to shape their ends!—­ends without which they could not have bound together the packages of wool with which you loaded the carts that backed up to the door in Henley Street, or have penetrated the veal of the calves that you killed in such a high style and with so much eloquence, and which loaded the tray that you daily bore on your shoulder to the kitchen-door of New Place, yet unsuspecting that you were to become its master!

Yet we would not too strongly insist upon this evidence, that Shakespeare in his boyhood served both as a butcher’s and a wool-stapler’s apprentice; for we venture to think that we have discovered evidence in his works that their author was a tailor.  For, in the first place, the word “tailor” occurs no less than thirty-five times in his plays. [The reader is to suppose that we are able to record this fact by an intimate acquaintance with every line that Shakespeare wrote, and by a prodigious effort of memory, and not by reference to Mrs. Clark’s Concordance.] “Measures” occurs nearly thrice as often; “shears” is found no less than six times; “thimble,” three times; “goose,” no less than twenty-seven times!—­and when we find, that, in all his thirty-seven plays, the word “cabbage” occurs but once, and then with the deliberate explanation that it means “worts” and is “good cabbage,” may we not regard such reticence upon this tender point as a touching confirmation of the truth of our theory?  See, too, the comparison which Shakespeare uses, when he desires to express the service to which his favorite hero, Prince Hal, will put the manners of his wild companions:—­

“So, like gross terms, The Prince will, in the perfectness of time, Cast off his followers; and their memory Shall as a pattern or a measure live By which his Grace must mete the lives of others.”

  2 Henry IV., Act iv.  Sc. 4.

And in writing one of his earliest plays, Shakespeare’s mind seems to have been still so impressed with memories of his former vocation, that he made the outraged Valentine, as his severest censure of Proteus, reproach him with being badly dressed:—­

  “Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch! 
  Thou friend of an ill fashion!”

  Act v.  Sc. 4.

Cleopatra, too, who, we may be sure from her conduct, was addicted to very “low necks,” after Antony’s death becomes serious, and declares her intention to have something “after the high Roman fashion.”  And what but a reminiscence of the disgust which a tailor of talent has for mending is it that breaks out in the Barons’ defiant message to King John?—­

  “The King hath dispossess’d himself of us;
  We will not line his thin bestained cloak.”