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He had a helpful body too; as not only every portrait and statue says; but his training as a youth, odd as it was, helped to develop it.

John Aubrey, in his manuscript in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, says: "Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick; his father was a butcher; and I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbors that when he (William) was a boy, he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.… He was a handsome, well-shapt man."

By-the-way, what a pity that those speeches were not kept till now! And in his pictures the face, neck, and shoulders are those of a vigorous man; while the fulness of the upper chest is noticeable and unusual. And look at his legs! For here is the MacMonnies statue from the Congressional Library. Strong, full, well made everywhere—a fit pair for this matchless man.

Goldwin Smith says: "In the early debates on religion, amid the great orators of the Parliaments of Charles; there had stood up a gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire; a fervent Puritan, with power on his brow and in his frame; with enthusiasm, genius, even the tenderness of genius, in his eye; and with an unmusical voice: sentences confused; his utterance almost choked by the vehemence of his emotion. On him God had not bestowed the gift of soul-enthralling words; his eloquence was the thunder of victory. Victory went with him when he fought, when she had deserted the standards of all other chiefs of his party.

"Hope shone in him 'as a pillar of fire,' when the light had gone out in all other men. He came to the front rank from the moment when debating was over, and the time arrived for organizing. From