UT what is the summing up on the other side? Merely the following copy of verses:

TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name

Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;

While I confess thy writings to be such

As neither man nor muse can praise too much.

'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways

Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;

For seeliest ignorance on these may light,

Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;

Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance

The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;

Or crafty malice might pretend this praise

And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.

These are as some infamous bawd or whore

Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?

But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,

Above the ill fortune of them, or the need,

I, therefore, will begin: Soul of the age,

The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage!

My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee by

Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie

A little further to make thee a room.

Thou art a monument without a tomb,

And art alive still while thy book doth live

And we have wits to read and praise to give.

That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses.

I mean with great but disproportioned muses.=

For if I thought my judgment were of years,

I should commit thee surely with thy peers,

And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,

Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line;

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honor thee I would not seek

For names: but call forth thundering Æschylus,

Euripides and Sophocles to us.

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,

To life again to hear thy buskin tread

And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on

Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time!

And all the muses still were in their prime

When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm

Our ears; or like a Mercury to charm.

Nature herself was proud of his designs,

And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines!

Which were so richly spun and woven so fit

As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit,

The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,

Neat Terence, witty Plautus, how not please,

But antiquated and deserted lie

As they were not of nature's family.

Yet must I not give nature all; thy Art,

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;

For though the poets matter Nature be,

His art doth give the fashion; and that he

Who casts to write a living line must sweat

(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat

Upon the muse's anvil; turn the same

And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,

Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,

For a good poet's made, as well as born;

And such wert thou! Look how the father's face

Lives in his issue, even so the race

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines

In his well-turned and true-filled lines:

In each of which he seems to shake a lance

As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.

Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make t-hose flights upon the banks of Thames

That did so take Eliza and our James!

Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage

Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,

Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like

night

And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.

This is all there is of Jonson's labored verses, of which very few Shakespeareans care to quote more than isolated passages of a line or two each. But taking them either as a whole (with their involved metaphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about Shakespeare's lines "shaking a lance at Ignorance")—or in spots (whichever spots the Shakespeareans prefer), what sort of historical proof does this poem afford? What sort of testimony is this as to a fact? Is it the sort we accept in our own personal affairs—in our business—in our courts of justice—in matters in which we have any thing at stake, or any living interest? Will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship Dolphin, on being furnished, by the Dolphin's owners, with a thrilling poem by Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Tup-per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the Dolphin, the thunderous tempest in which she went down—the sky-capping waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., etc.? Will any jury of twelve men hang a thirteenth man for murder on production, by the State, of a harrowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassination, stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable widows, orphans, and the like? And shall we require less or more proof, in proportion as the fact to be proved is nearer or more remote?

However, since the Shakespeareans rest their case on these verses, (for any one who cares to examine for himself will find the residue of the so-called "contemporary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be rather criticism—that is to say eulogy, for we find very little of any other sort of literary criticism in those days—as to the compositions than chronicle as to the man) we can well afford to waive these questions, and cross-examine Ben Jonson and his verses without pressing any objection to their competency.

For criticism of the works is what Meres's * opinion that "the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his "Venus and Adonis," his "Lucrece," his sugared sonnets among his private friends...." As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage....

As Epius Stoio said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they would speake Latin, so I say that the Muses would speake with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speake English, etc., etc., etc., amount to; and so Weever's

"Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue,

I swore Apollo got them, and none other"—

probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he swore that they were certainly Apollo's. And if the comments of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard Digges, Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. But panegyric is not history—at least it can not override history.

Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony, contained in the copy of verses entitled "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," written by Mr. Ben Jon-son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, there would actually remain nothing except to lay the Shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of exploded fallacies.

However, let it not be ruled out merely on the ground that it is in rhyme. We have no less an authority than Littleton—"auetoritas philosopho-rum, medieorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan-dÆ et tenendÆ" *—to the effect that the testimony, even of poets, is sometimes to be received. It is to be ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of the witness—by its appearing that the witness, elsewhere in the same controversy, testifies to a state of facts exactly opposite. For the truth is that, whatever Ben Jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" William Shakespeare, whenever, "as a friend, he dropped into poetry," he was considerably more careful when he sat himself down to write "cold prose."

Just as "Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion should "fright the ladies," and "hang every mother's son" of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a man as other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, however tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in his prosody, in his prologue in prose was scrupulous to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains—Ossian piled on Pelion—of hearsay and lapse of time; oceans of mere opinion and "gush" would, of course, amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged alongside of the testimony of one single, competent, contemporary eye-witness. No wonder the Shakespeareans are eager to subpoena Ben Jonson's verses. But, all the same, they are marvelously careful not to subpoena his prose.

And yet this prose is extant, and by no means inaccessible. Malien Jonson died, in 1637, he left behind him certain memoranda which were published in 1640, and are well-known as "Ben Jonson's Discoveries." One of these memoranda—for the work is in the disjointed form of a common-place book of occasional entries—is devoted to the eminent men of letters in the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or familiarity. It runs as follows:

Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equaled to their empire. Imperium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in the former sÆculum), Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry, Earl of Surry, Chal-oner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were, for their times, admirable; and the more because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicholas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. The Earl of Essex, noble and high, and Sir Walter Raleigh not to be contemned, either for judgment or style. Sir Henry Saville, grave and truly lettered. Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent in both. Lord Egerton, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked. But his learned and able, but unfortunate successor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. * In short, within this view, and about this time, were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows backward. So that he may be so named and stand as the mark and ———— of our language. **

Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had published the verses which made William Shakespeare. Only fourteen years before he had asserted—what the world has taken his word for, and never questioned from that day to this—that his "best beloved" William Shakespeare had been the "soul of the age"—"not for an age, but for all time"—and his works "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much!" We have no means of knowing the precise date at which Ben Jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled, and his feelings experienced a change. But he leaves behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoranda, this catalogue "of all the wits" living in his day, who, in his opinion, "could honour a language or help study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare, the name—not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that—only, about fourteen years ago—he had deemed worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence concerning William Shakespeare, the passage we have quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon-son himself. But they are not silent. They devote a whole paragraph to William Shakespeare—but in the proper place; that is to say, not among "the wits who could honour a language or help study," but among the author's personal acquaintance. This is all there is of this paragraph as to the real William Shakespeare:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "would he had blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any). He was (indeed) honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power, would that the rule of it had been so too! Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said in the person of CÆsar—one speaking to him—"CÆsar, thou dost me wrong;" he replied, "CÆsar never did wrong, but with just cause," and such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than pardoned. *

That is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of William Shakespeare!—that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked; that, in playing the part of CÆsar on the stage, somebody interpolated the speech, "CÆsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response; ** and that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand Shakespearean lines!—a thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call "Shakespeare!"

Fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! Ben Jonson does not specify which thousand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for all time!" And yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man Jonson that we build monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of his name! If there is not a strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to Shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:

"Though need make many poets, and some such

As art and nature have not bettered much,

Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage

As he dare serve the ill customs of the age:

Or purchase your delight at such a rate

As for it, he himself must justly hate.

To make a child now swaddled, to proceed

Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed—

Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords

And help of some few foot and half foot words—

Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,

And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars!

He [that is, Ben himself] rather prays you will be pleased to see

One such to-day, as other plays should be;

[that is, one he wrote himself ]

Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,

Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please."

Ben says this himself—in the prologue to his "Every Man in his Humour."

Again, in the "Induction" to his "Bartholomew Fair," he has this fling at "The Tempest:"

"If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it," he says, "nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." *

But that Jonson never himself believed, or expressed himself as believing, that William Shakespeare was a poet (except in this rhymed panegyric which Heminges and Condell prefixed to the first folio), there is still further and perhaps stronger proof. Three years after William Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson paid a visit to William Drummond of Hawthornden, and spent with him the greater part of the month of April, 1019 (or, as some fix it, the month of January, in that year). Drummond was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poetical reputation was what had attracted Jonson to make the visit. At any rate, he did visit him, and Drummond kept notes of Jonson's conversation. These notes are in the form of entries or items, grouped under Drummond's own headings or titles, such as: "his acquaintance and behavior with poets living with him."

Daniel was at jealousies with him.

Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him.

That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses. That Sir John Roe loved him; and when they, too, were ushered by my Lord Sullblk from a mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle to him which began: That next to Playes, the Court and the State were the best. God threateneth Kings, Kings Lords, (as) Lords do us.

He beat Marston and took his pistol from him.

Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected him, because a friend to Drayton.

That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly.

Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall.

That Markam (who added his Arcadia) was not of the number of the Faithfull, (i. e), Poets, and but a base fellow.

That such were Day and Middleton.

That Chapman and Fletcher were loved by him.

Overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie. etc., etc.

There are, in all, between two and three hundred entries of a similar character. Now, in one of these entries, Jonson is represented as saying that he "esteemeth Done the first poet in the world in some things;" but there is nothing put in Jonson's month, in the whole category, about the "Star of Poets," save that, in another place, is the following item:

"That Shakspeer wanted arte," and, further on, the following:

"Shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, when there is no see neer by some 100 miles." *

These notes were first printed by Mr. David Laing, who discovered them among the manuscripts of Sir Robert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physician of Edinburgh. They were preserved in the form of a copy in Sibbald's handwriting. Sibbald was a friend of the Bishop Sage, who edited Drummond's works in 1711. These notes were believed by Sir Walter Scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were printed first in the "Archaeological Scotica," in or about 1723. At any rate, they were never printed by Sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which suggested a motive for forgery, and, internally, they agree with Ben Jonson's own "Discoveries," especially as to his (Jonson's) estimate of William Shakespeare.

And yet Ben Johnson was the beneficiary and friend of William Shakespeare—the "immortal Shakespeare"—whom Ben "honours this side idolatry," but whom we are not fearful of passing the bounds of idolatry in worshiping to-day. Ben Johnson was an overworked rhymester, and made his rhymes do double and treble duty. The first couplet of the prologue just cited

" Though need make many poets, and some such

As art and nature have not bettered much"—

needs only a little hammering over to become the

"While I confess thy writings to be such

As neither man nor muse can praise too much"—

of the mortuary verses which—as we say—made Shakespeare Shakespeare. When the rich manager's alleged works were to be collected, the poor scholar, who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was called upon for a tribute. But the poor scholar forbore to draw on the storehouse of his wits, though willing: to hammer over some of his old verses for the occasion. He once assured posterity, in rhyme, that they must not "give nature all," but remember his gentle Shakespeare's art, how he would "sweat and strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil" (in other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his genius to artificial perfection). And yet he deliberately tells Drummond, long years after, and puts it down in black and white over his own. signature, that this same Shakespeare "wanted art," and that the great trouble with him was that he talked too much. Is it possible that the ideal Shakespeare, the mighty miracle-working demigod, is only the accidental creation of a man who was poking fun at a shadow? Let us not proceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious consideration of Mr. Ben Jonson's unimpassioned prose.

If the paragraph from the "Discoveries" last above quoted—which estimates William Shakespeare precisely as history estimates him, namely, as a clever fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters in London—is not to be regarded as a confession that Ben Jonson's verses were written (or rewritten) more out of generosity to his late friend's memory—rather in the exuberance of a poetic license of apotheosis—than with a literal adherence to truth;* then it must be conceded that the result is such a facing both ways as hangs any Jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium as to the Shakespearean controversy, and entitles Ben Jonson himself, as a witness for anybody or to any thing, to simply step down and out.

For, admitting that his poetry is just as good as his prose—and probably the Shakespeareans would care to assert no more than that—it is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for neither; and a rule of common law no less than of common sense that his evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be called upon to believe and disbelieve one and the same witness at the same time. And so we are relieved from accounting for the "Jonson testimony," as did Lord Palmerston, by saying: "O, those fellows always hang together; or, its just possible Jonson may have been deceived like the rest;" * or by asking ourselves if a score of rhymes by Ben Johnson, a fellow craftsman (not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropical or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi)—are to outweigh all historic certainty? If Jonson had written a life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of William Shakespeare, it might have been different. But he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical eulogy; and fact is one thing, and poetry—unless there is an exception in this instance—is conceded to be altogether another.

But since numberless good people are suspicious of rules of law as applied to evidence, regarding them as over-nice, finical, and as framed rather to keep out truth than to let it in, let-us waive the legal maxim, and admit the Jonsonian testimony to be one single, consistent block of contemporary evidence. But, no sooner do we do this, than we find ourselves straightway floundering in a slough of absurdities for greater, it seems to us, than any we have yet encountered. To illustrate: It is necessary to the Shakespearean theory that in the days of Elizabeth and James there should have been not only a man, but a genius, a wit, and a poet, of the name of William Shakespeare; and that all these—man, genius, wit, and poet—should have been one and the same individual. Taking all the Jonsonian testimony, prose and poetry, together, such an individual there was, and his name was William Shakespeare, as required. But—still following Jonson's authority—at the same period and in the same town of London there was a certain gentleman named Bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had, moreover, "filled up all numbers—and" in the same days "performed that which may be compared either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." We have, then, not only a "wit and poet" named Shakespeare, but a "wit and poet" named Bacon; and, since Jonson is nowhere too modest to admit that he himself was a "wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually not one but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in London, in the golden age of English literature. We have already seen that, of this trio, two—Bacon and Shakespeare, if we are to believe the Shakespeareans—were personally unknown to each other. It is worth our while to pause right here, and see what this statement involves.

They are all three—Bacon, Jonson, and Shakespeare—dwelling in the same town at the same moment; are, all three, writers and wits, earning their living by their pens. Ben Jonson is the mutual friend. He is of service to both—he translates Bacon's English into Latin for him, * and writes plays for William Shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he ultimately becomes the Boswell of both, and runs from one to the other in rapture.

His admiration for Bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose), amounts to a passion; his admiration for Shakespeare, on the other hand (according to his poetry), amounts to a passion, he declares (in prose) that Bacon "hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared and preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." He declares (in poetry) of Shakespeare that he may be left alone—

"....for comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Borne

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."

And yet he never, while going from one to the other, mentions Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any "order" to his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that this absolutely inimitable Bacon (who has surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness the masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare(who has likewise surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome); this Boswell of a Jonson, go-between of two men of repute and public character, travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each to the world outside (using the same figures of speech for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two public characters themselves each is absolutely ignorant of the other's existence! And yet they ought to have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any extent. Persons there have been who asserted, as we shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their writings, that Bacon and "Shakespeare" were one and the same man, and that what appeared to be "parallelisms" and coincidences in Bacon and "Shakespeare" were thus to be accounted for. But, admitting their separate identity, it is certain either that the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the natural philosopher; either of which looks very much like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we shall see further on, * some of these "parallelisms" are not coincidences, but something very like identities.

It will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not annihilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare from their places in history. If, however, the Jonsonian poetry were wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in London, there also dwell there three other gentlemen—Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well-known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen of elegant tastes—poets, men about town, critics—who, if the town were being convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the circumstance. We do not add to this list Southampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. But the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as are of assistance to us here. Bacon, in his "Apothegms," Spenser in his poems, * and Raleigh and Matthew in their remains—especially Matthew—who, like Bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson himself—appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character as "Shakespeare" in all their sauntering about London.

Especially on one occasion does Sir Tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if there had been any "Shakespeare" within his ken, he could very properly—and would, we think, very naturally—have mentioned him. In the "Address to the Reader," prefixed to one of his works, * he says, speaking of his own date, "We have also rare compositions made among us which look so many fair ways at once that I doubt it will go near to pose any other nations of Europe to muster out in any age four men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel four such us we are able to show—Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. For they were all a kind of monsters in their various ways," etc.

Besides, these four—or, dismissing Spenser, who was a poet exclusively—then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and Tobie Matthew—however else dissimilar, were any thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men of the court and of the world. They mingled among their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what they met and saw during their careers. They both live and move in the very town and in the very days when this rare poetry which Emerson says "the greatest minds value most" was appearing. But, if William Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it possible to escape the conviction that not one of them all—not Bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of antique not only, but of living and contemporary literature, and overfond of writing down his impressions for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr. Grant White says they were, some morsel of them must have reached his ear or eye)—not Raleigh, courtier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals)—not Tobie Matthew, who was all this latter with less of responsibility and mental balance—ever so much as heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned? That not one of these ever heard of a name that was in everybody's mouth—of a living man so famous that, as we shall presently consider, booksellers were using his name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill-ins: the most fashionable theater in London from cockpit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that the great Queen Elizabeth herself stepped down from the throne and walked across his stage to do him honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was to write an autograph letter (for these must all be considered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the King James story is only one of the "yarns," * cooked for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor—in orthodox procession from "might have been" to "was"—and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle incredible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any and every fable in this connection rather than accept the truth of history! To be sure, it is not absolutely impossible that these three men should have been cognizant of William Shakespeare's existence without mentioning him in their favors to posterity.

But, under all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of three Englishmen in London to-day, in 1881—let us say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne—without collusion, writing down a list of their most illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them mentioning Mr. Tennyson! Or, assuming that Tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that "William Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chroniclers—Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne-sitting themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, (who, Emerson says, "took the inventory of the human understanding, for his time,") and his satellite Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns worship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no "Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "William Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and manager in the Globe and Blackfriars play-houses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age of English!

Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere negative evidence; that not only three but three million of men might be found who had never mentioned or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, in view of what the Shakespearean plays are, and of what their author must have been, and of when and where these three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew—lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew—constitute, at the very least, a "negative pregnant" not to be omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, moreover, a negative pregnant which—if we admitted all the Ben Jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as evidence on the one side—could not be excluded as evidence on the other. In which event it is fairest to the Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether. **

Besides, Ben is what the Scotchmen call "a famous witness" (if the commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage manager, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his obligations to over-master him when writing the "Discoveries." But, in any event, it would be easier to believe that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, than to swallow the incredible results of a literal version of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the conclusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be: either that the poetry was the result of his obligations to William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben Jonson stands simply dehors the case—a witness for neither.

It is not, then—it is very far from being—because we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great works ascribed to him. It is because we know so much. No sooner did men open their histories, turn up the records and explore the traditions and trace the gossip of' the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in the face. Long before any "Baconian theory" arose to account for these anomalies: at the instant these plays began to be valued for any thing else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "To be told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 'Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam. *

"Every accession of in formation we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the poet," cries Mr. William Henry Smith. * "I am one of the many," testifies Mr. Furness, "who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space of each other; are there any other two things in the world more incongruous?" **

It was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean authorship, either that William Shakespeare should be historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student of deep insight into nature and morals—a poet, philosopher, and all the rest—or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the myriad-minded genius required. In other words, it was only necessary to so cloud over the facts as to make the "Shakespearean miracle" to be, not that William Shakespeare had written the works, but—that history should be so silent concerning a "Shakespeare!" So long as the Shakespeareans could cry, "Behold a mysterious dispensation of Providence—that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever held—Homer and William Shakespeare—we know absolutely nothing!"—so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name "William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because we know so little, but because we know so much about the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accurately what manner of man he was. We know almost every thing about him, in short, except—what we do know about Homer—that the words now attributed to him were his. Homer, at least, we can trace to his "Iliad" and his "Odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. But neither to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the works be placed in our hands for the first time anonymously; given the chronicles of the age of Elizabeth and James in which to search for an author of these works, would any thing we found in either lead us to pronounce William Shakespeare their author? And has any thing happened since to induce us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakespeare was not the man he was, lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright?"

Nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the commentators. By the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker—but, after all, a Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. But that, little by little—each commentator, either in rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to be one item ahead of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, or too subservient to authority to rebel—it grew to vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge "biographies" of the last half century to be assured. It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy contributed to the "EncyclopÆdia Britannica" its article "Shakespeare." That about the story of the prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky-raftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, and poetry, no patron of the "EncyclopÆdia" would probably have doubted. But that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should have printed so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy supplied to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must certainly command surprise. There can surely be complaint as to the variety of the performance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely speculates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and whether that gentleman received the patronage of Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and instruct the reader). And his speculations as to whether the messengers who sped to Worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies of the names "Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially pretty reading. But—with facilities in 1839 for writing a history of the Stratford lad, which the Stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hundred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never to have possessed—Mr. De Quincy quite surpasses himself in setting us exactly right as to William Shakespeare. And, first, as to the birthday. There has always been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birthday than the day dedicated to their patron saint. The Stratford parish records certifying to the christening of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, 1564 (which Mr. De Quincy forgets was "old style," and so, in any event, twelve days before the corresponding date in the present or "new style"), and the anniversary of St. George being fixed for celebration on the 23d of April, it had come to be unanimously resolved by the commentators that, in Warwickshire, it was the custom to christen infants on the third day after birth, and that, therefore, William Shakespeare was born on the anniversary of St. George, April 23, 1564. To baptise a three-days-old baby, in an English April, a period five days earlier than, in the mild latitude of Palestine, the Israelites thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems a very un-English proceeding. So Mr. De Quincy, who would rather perish than mislead, thinks, after all, the birth might have been a day earlier. "After all," he says, "William might have been born on the 22d. Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, "has sometimes struck us for supposing that the 22d might be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that Shakespeare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was married on the 22d of April, ten years exactly from the poet's death, and the reason for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious grandfather's birthday, which, there is good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations!" But even Mr. De Quincy appears to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the line somewhere; for he immediately adds, "Still this choice may have been an accident" (so many things, that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday!), "or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief that Shakespeare was born and died on the 23d of April. We can not do wrong if we drink to his memory both on the 22d and 23d." *

Mr. De Quincy's proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to forever secure his popularity among Englishmen; but it remains, nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous encyclopaedia should admit this sort of work among its articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia, soap, Savonarola, and its other references in S! Like his fellow Shakespeareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, or the old clerk, or the Rev. Richard Davies, or any one else who, having lived at dates inconveniently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, were awkward customers about whom it was best to say nothing. He cannot claim never to have heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying that William Shakespeare was "a handsome, well-shaped man." But this is the only allusion he makes to Aubrey or to any body else who lived within eyesight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who (we admit), if a well-conducted person, ought reasonably to have been the man Mr. De Quincy and his ilk turn him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any body who happened to be born within a hundred years of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmountable—namely, as to where the material of the plays came from—Mr. De Quincy skips over these with his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on Stratford High Street! (The identical desk which William occupied during this period of attendance at that institution of learning was promptly supplied by the Stratford guides, upon hearing Mr. De Quincy's discovery.) "Old Aubrey," two hundred years nearer his subject, was careful to give his school-master's story "for what it was worth," admitting that his authority for the statement that William Shakespeare was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the statement of one "Beeston;" but who was "Beeston?" Some of our modern commentators have conjectured that possibly William, being a sort of model or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little boys' lessons, which gave rise to the "school-master" story. But Mr. De Quincy allows no demurrer nor doubt to his assertions in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica. And for these "two terms" (of course), no further authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes none. Such dry things as references are gracefully compensated for by favoring the reader in search for Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers fourteen pages octavo. * His cue has had prolific following.

Now-a-days our "biographies" of William Shakespeare are huge tomes of Elizabethan and other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argumentation; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk and show of research, into accepting the whole rather than plunge into so vast and shoreless a sea of apparent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. For such is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the less likely is it to be read or refuted. And so, in view of the great eye-filling books labeled "biographies" of William Shakespeare—volumes commensurate with the idea of a life which might, in time at least, have compassed the mighty works—one need not doubt that "William Shakespeare" was the name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays.

But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincy and his ilk, and was forced to confront the William Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon and the epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis.

It is not, of course, because William stuck the calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or apprentice, as some lay), to a butcher or a glover, a tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing. We may trace the genius of Turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or described the Edison phonograph. He knew and practiced what he was taught (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave his own works behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of genius. His history, up to a certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civilizations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten, the very names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mercenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of Scotland under one of its primitive kings—matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! In the case of Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be content if the genius of Bobert Burns could glorify the goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten—with all the learning that the past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. And yet, if Bobert Burns had sung of the Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubtless—with history staring him in the face—have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty over which a Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight can not easily clamber.

If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, Land of all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote—to find him, "Fancy's child," warbling "his native Wood-notes wild," indeed! But of Troy, Tyre, and Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child" could sing in the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when "a tinker was rogue by statute." * And yet he, according to Macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which England should be proudest. ** What was the miracle in the case of John Bunyan? He produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... This is the highest miracle of art, that things whichare not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought."

But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun-yan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo-Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious Norman of the court. "The Bunyan vocabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must ask of William Shakespeare, the question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all England.... It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.... He enters the Parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.... His 'Greatheart,' his 'Captain Boanerges,5 and his 'Captain Credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among those martial saints* who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.... He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavaliers... to oppress the Dissenters.... he was flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. Here are the school and the experience, and the result is writings which show a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience." ** Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such investigation. "Where did he get his material?"

"Oh, he picked it up around Stratford, somehow!"

"But his learning?"

"Oh, he found it lying around the theater somewhere!"

Probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the chroniclers! And so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural question, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, the question is not, "Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, "Had he access to the material from which the plays are composed?" Admit him to have been the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where did he get—not the poetry, but—the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information—the facts that crowd these pages?

And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that works to William Shakespeare's renown, and a corresponding retention of every tradition or anecdote to his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why reject the story of King James's autograph letter, and retain the story of the trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy's deer? the answer must be: first; because, while there is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of improbability in the former. King James was a king, and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen Victoria; but it would be vastly improbable that Queen Victoria should write an autograph letter to the haberdasher to that effect. Second, because the poaching story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the memory of man runneth not to a time when it was not believed; whereas the King James story first appeared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Bernard Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the word of "a credible person then living." But everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no "biographer" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, the letter from King James and the letter from Queen Elizabeth, produced by young Ireland, are equally genuine correspondence. But the stories of the latter class, while not beyond question, are at least not improbable, considering the record of the youth Shakespeare at Stratford, while those of the first are certainly improbable on their face, and can be in almost every case traced to their exact source.

So the story of his holding horses, while by no means authentic, (Mr White says it was not heard of until the middle of the last century), is by no means improbable, seeing that the lad ran away to London——and Rowe and the old sexton both agree that he began—as self-made men do—at the bottom. The story of Queen Elizabeth's crossing the stage and dropping her glove, which Shakespeare picked up and presented with an impromptu, Mr. White himself smiles at, with the remark that "the anecdote is plainly one made to meet the craving for personal details of Shakespeare's life," * and he treats it as he does the "Florio" in the British Museum, supposed to have belonged to William Shakespeare, because that name is written——after his mode—on a fly-leaf; with a pleasant wish that he were able to believe in it. *

Far from being of the class that kings delight to honor, it is simply impossible to turn one's researches into any channel that leads into the vicinity of Stratford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, one unmistakable trace familiar in all cases of vulgar and illiterate families; namely, the fact that they never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of what vowels or consonants their own name was composed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. They answered—or made their marks—indifferently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, ** or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. ***

In the records of the town council of Stratford, of which John Shakespeare was no unimportant part, the name is written in fourteen different forms, which may be tabulated as follows:——

In the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, it is twice written, each time Shagspere. On the grave of Susanna, it is Shakespere; and on the other graves of the family, Shakespeare, except that under the bust it is Shakspeare. That is to say, just as many orthographies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. Any lawyer's clerk who has had occasion to search for evidence among the uneducated classes, knows how certainly a lower or higher grade of intelligence will manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indifference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accurately "taken down." Whether this infallible rule obtained in the days of the Shakespeares or not, or whether a family, that was so utterly stolid as not to know if their patronymic was spelled with a "c," a "k," or an "x," could have appreciated and bestowed upon their child a classical education (not to ring the changes upon politics, philosophy, etc., right here), is for the reader to judge for himself.

Mr. W. H. Smith maintains that Shakespeare, like the rest of his family, was unable to write, and had learned, by practice only, to make the signature which he was assured was his name. Mr. Smith founds his theory on the fact that, in the Will the word "seale" (in the formula, "witness my seale," etc.) is erased, and the word "hand" substituted. In a letter to Mr. Shedding, * Mr. Smith claims that this erasure and substitution prove that the draughtsman who prepared the Shakespeare Will, knowing that the testator could not write, did not suppose that he would sign his name, and so prepared it for the superimposition of his seal. "I know," says Mr. Smith, "that you will ingeniously observe that that might have been his belief, but that the fact could better have been proved if 'hand' had been erased and 'seale' inserted. But Shakespeare, being proud of his writing, and, as this would probably be his last opportunity, insisted on exhibiting his 'hand.'" According to Mr. Smith, therefore, Ben Jonson's speech about "never blotting out a line," was redundant. But, whether able to write, or, like his ancestors and descendants, signing with a mark, he clearly cared no more than they how people spelled his name. A Mr. George Wise, of Philadelphia, has been able to compile a chart exhibiting one thousand nine hundred and six ways of spelling the Stratford boy's name; ** A commentary on the efforts of Mr. Halliwell and others, to establish the canonical orthography, which might well reduce them to despair. The fact is, that there can no more be a canonical spelling of the name Shakespeare than there can be a canonical face of the boy William. The orthography of Shakespeare, as now accepted, and the face now accepted as belonging to William of that name, are both modern inventions.

Even the "best of that family" (according to the old clerk), William, when called to sign his own last will and testament (obliged by law to sign each of the three sheets upon which it was engrossed) three times, spelled his name a different way each time. His daughter Judith lived and died without being able to spell or write it at all; Milton, Spenser, Sidney, even Gower and Chaucer (whom even our own Artemus Ward pronounced "no speller"), had but one way of writing their own names—and never dreamed of one thousand nine hundred and six. The name is now supposed to have been simply "Jacques-Pierre" (James Peter), which had been mispronounced—as Englishmen mispronounce French—for unnumbered generations. *

This is the present mispronunciation of Jacques prevalent in Warwickshire. And, such being the true origin of the name, it is, of course, natural to find it as we do, written in two words "Shake-speare," in those days. It is not William Shakespeare's fault that he sprang from an illiterate family, but that—after growing so rich as to be able to enjoy an income of $25,000 a year, he should never send his children—especially his daughter Judith—to school, so that the poor girl, on being married, on the 11th day of February, 1616, should be obliged to sign her marriage bond with a mark, shows, we think, that he was not that immortal he would have been had he written the topmost literature of the world—the Shakespearean Drama! But, still, this most unsatisfactory person—this man who answers, like Mr. Carroll's skipper, to "hi, or to any loud cry"—

"To what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name

But especially thing-um-a-jig,"

or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may happen to hit on when he wants the poor little "supernumerary," and "Joannes Factotum"—actually lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birthright of bis own or of any century, and has clung thereon like another old man of the sea on Sinbad's shoulders, and been carried down through these three hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or up, to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the true estate of somebody else! For, not only has the world not yet gotten its eyes half open, but it contumaciously refuses, to open them to the facts in the case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this stupendous hoax—("Shakespearean" indeed, in that it has outlasted and outlived all the other hoaxes put together—the witchcraft hoax, the Chatterton hoax, the Ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of them); that has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, like Ireland's, Collier's, and Cunningham's upon its back, until their little day has been accomplished, and they have dropped off, just as, one of these days, the present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last, without a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and confess himself its disciple.