Show IN LONDON compliment anil to the honey author now london says dr in tho atlantic was a email city of from to souls or about tho size it providence or minneapolis ot tho present tsuio in cities of such size everybody of tho slightest eminence is known town and such persons anro suro to to diore or loss acquainted with ono another it la a ery exception when it s not before ills thirtieth year shak was well known in london as nn actor a writer of plays mul tho manager of a prominent theater in that year in his colln clouts come bonio again alluding to under action or paid him this compliment and there though lest not least Is action A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found whoso full of high invention doth like himself heroically bound four years this in 1698 francis mores his book entitled pal ladas tamla a very interesting contribution to literary history the author who had been an instructor in rhetoric in tho university of oxford was then living in london near the globo theater in this book mores tolls his readers that the sweet witty soul of ovid lives in mellifluous and honey tongued shakespeare witness his venus and adonis his lu croco his sugared sonnets among his private friends ato to suppose that such a man ae this in a town the size of minneapolis connected with a principal theater writer of tho most popular plays of abo day a poet whom men acro already coupling with homer and pindar to suppose that such a man was not known to all the educated people in the town is simply absurd there acro probably very few men women or cill dren in London between 1695 and 1610 who did not know who shakespeare was when he passed them in tho street and as for such wits as drank ale and sack at tho mermaid as for raleigh and bacon and seldan and the rest to suppose that shakes did not know them well nay to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest wit of those ambrosial nights is about as sensible as to suppose that he never saw a maypole john fiske in atlantic |