CHAPTER III.
Meditation and Imagination.
There is a book in the British Museum which would have, for many people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world; it is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne, and it bears Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf.

There are other books which must have had the same ownership; among them were Holinshed's "Chronicles" and North's translation of Plutarch.

Shakespeare would have laid posterity under still greater obligations, if that were possible, if in some autobiographic mood he had told us how he read these books; for never, surely, were books read with greater insight and with more complete absorption.

Indeed, the fruits of this reading were so rich and ripe that the books from which their juices came seem but dry husks and shells in comparison.

The reader drained the writer dry of every particle of suggestiveness, and then recreated the material in new and imperishable forms.