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Rh and mustard and articles of less dignity. All this may be well for the great reputation the world accords to him. It may be well that he left no handwriting in familiar lines, no unravelled threads of his common human nature which captious critics might follow up into the inner recesses of his daily life, and fleck the disk of his fair fame with the specks and motes they found in the search after moral discrepancies. It is a wonder that a man of such genius could have died less than two centuries and a half ago, and have left a character so completely shut in and barred against "the peering littlenesses" of, yellow-eyed curiosity. A soft, still blue, of a hundred years deep, surrounds his personal being. Through this mild cerulean haze it shows itself fair and round. Well is it for him, perhaps, that we of to-day cannot get nearer to him than the gentle horizon of this intervening century. It is a seamless mantle that Providence has wrapped around the stature of his life, in which no envious Casca can ever make a rent to get at the frailties or small actions of a great master. No man ever lived more hermetically in his writings than Shakespeare. His personal being is as completely shut up and embodied in them as Homer's is in his grand epics. Will the life that breathes in them prove immortal? Three centuries are not immortality. Will the sexcentenary anniversary of his birth be celebrated after