Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Another fact which this book is going to emphasize about Stratford is, that it had long been a border settlement of Anglo-Saxondom in the latter's advance against the Celts of Wales and Western Britain. Some such position the town had once occupied for hundreds of years, and the memory thereof was still alive and at work in the poet's youth. Thus he drank of the spirit of that strong persistent drive of the Anglo-Saxon to the westward, which in his time was just beginning to push out to America, and which had already settled Jamestown in Virginia, and which has since his day rolled across the whole Western Continent from Ocean to Ocean. Many towns in the Mississippi Valley have a frontier history which is not dissimilar to that of Stratford, though not so aged, and which still lies back in their memory and forms a unique strand of their character. Thus they may well find in Shakespeare a phase of their own vivid experience, which has not yet become altogether obliterated even in England. The very name of the poet's family has in it a memento of border warfare, if we with alert eyes glance back into its history. The Shakespeakes. May we not catch already a note of defiance, if not a downright challenge to combat, in this caption which designates seemingly a brood or clan ofspear-shakers, who reach back with their peculiar weapon long before musket and gun powder? At any rate some such conception must have been in the mind of Edmund Spenser, famous Elizabethan cotemporary, who, wishing to compliment his singing comrade on what he probably knew would tickle family pride, selected just this war-tuned name for his praise, and hailed the poet Whose Muse full of high thought's invention Doth like himself, heroically sound? which allusion, though nameless, is supposed to be ap...