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250, home-made; how selfish, how angular, how Anglican! A country which would long ago have been swallowed up by the sea if it had not feared that it would cause internal pain a race, a grey gaping monster, which breathes only nitrogen and deadly ennui, and which will certainly at last hang itself with a colossal cable.

And in such a land and among such people William Shakespeare first saw the light in 1564. But the England of those days where—in the Northern Bethlehem called Stratford-upon-Avon—the man was born to whom we are indebted for the world's gospel known as the Shakesperian Drama that England was certainly very different from that of to-day; it was even termed Merry England, and it flourished in gleaming colour, masque-merriment, deep meaning frolicsome folly, sparkling earnest action,