Page:1909. Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography.djvu/134

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD? The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, in crease the regret with which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as was not worthy such a student."

He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his Essays. He published the inestimable Treatise De Argumentis Scientiarum.

Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:

The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the mark of his mind. The best jestbook in the world is that which he dictated from memory, with out referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study. 120