Part 3

Who knows? Where I stood, old Chaucer may have stood to see his Canterbury Pilgrims pass. Falstaff, reeling home from Dame Quickly's Tavern with his load of sherris-sack, may have sat here to ponder on his honour. Shakespeare may have leaned on the old milestone as he watched the Virgin Queen's pageant to Tilbury Fort in Armada times. Through James Ball's and Jack Cade's uprising, through the Wars of the Roses, the Fire of London, the Plague, the Stuart upheaval, and Cromwell's stirring times--through all these the London Stone stood, "fixed in the ground very deep," says Stowe, "that if carts do runne against it through negligence the wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken." And now it links the bustle and roar of modern London with the strife out of which London grew, and keeps our conceits reminded of the forefathers who lived and fought in Britain here to make the way more smooth for us.

Ere cabs or omnibuses were; ere telephones, telegraphs, or railways; ere Magna Charta; before William the Conqueror brought our ancient nobility's ancestors over from Normandy--London knew this stone.

It has endured longer than any king, it has survived generations and dynasties of monarchs. "Walls have ears," they say, and Shakespeare "finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, and sermons in stones."

What a tale would he tell that could find the tongue of the London Stone!

Think of all the men and women who have passed it, seen it with their eyes, felt it with their hands; the millions of simple, faithful, anonymous people who have cheerfully slaved, and bled, and died, to help--as each according to his lights conceived--the honour, safety, and well-being of his country.

We have paid homage to the celebrated dead: what about those that have done their duty and have received neither fame nor monument? Their blood, too, cries out to me from the paving-stones of London.

Alas for men! that they should be so blind, And laud as gods the scourges of their kind! Call each man glorious who has led a host, And him most glorious who has murdered most! Alas! that men should lavish upon these The most obsequious homage of their knees-- That those who labour in the arts of peace, Making the nations prosper and increase, Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave, Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save-- But that the Leaders who despoil the earth, Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth, Should with their statues block the public way, And stand adored as demi-gods for aye.

But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life.

During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her three young charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in the flames.

When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des Fédérés in the Père-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse.

My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer.

THE MERMAID TAVERN

There hath been great sale and utterance of wine, Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine, In every country, region, and nation, But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation; And the Bore's Head, near London Stone, The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known; The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head, And many like places that make noses red; Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry, And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree; The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange, King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range; The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand, Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.

(_Newes From Bartholomew Fayre_; an undated, anonymous black-letter poem.)

"Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century, "was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns."

The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum, sometimes too the Theatre.

The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and, strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An old song of the period describes a feast of this sort, and tells how each woman carried with her some goose, or pork, the wing of a capon, or a pigeon pie. Arrived at the tavern, they ordered the best wine. They praised the liquor, and, under its inspiriting influence, discussed their husbands, with whom they were naturally dissatisfied; and then went home by different streets, perfidiously assuring their lawful masters that they had been to church.

This evidence is useful and seemly to be here set down, as indicating the true origin of habits for which much undeserved censure has been in these later days inflicted upon mere imitators.

The men, whose chiefest fault has ever been their too great readiness to follow the women, fell insensibly into the habit, and have been there ever since.

And what a glorious time they have had of it! To recall only Fuller's description of the "wit combates" between Shakespeare's "quickness of wit and invention" against Ben Jonson's "far higher learning," and "solid, but slow performances," at the historic Mermaid; and Beaumont's rapturous praise in his epistle to Jonson of the banquet of wit and admirable conversation which they had enjoyed at the same place!

Oh to have been at the Mermaid on the night when Jonson had been burnt out at the Bankside Globe! or on the night of Shakespeare's first performance before Elizabeth--when he had first, perhaps, set eyes on Mary Fitton!

All the wits of that age of giants were wont to assemble, after the theatre, at the Mermaid, the Devil, and the Boar. Exuberant Fletcher and graver Beaumont would "wentle" in from their lodging on Bankside, wearing each other's clothes, and wrangling perhaps about their plots--a habit which on one occasion caused them to be arrested, a fussy listener having heard them disputing in a tavern as to whether they should or should not assassinate the king. Poor, drunken, profligate Greene, and his debauched companions, Marlowe and George Peele,--all of whom ended their riotous courses with painful and shameful deaths,--are sure to have lurched in on many a razzling night. Regular visitors, too, were "Crispinus" Dekker, and his friend Wilson the actor, whom Beaumont mentions as a boon-companion over the Mermaid wine:--

Filled with such moisture, in most grievous qualms Did Robert Wilson write his singing psalms.

From Whitehall, with "their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume," would swagger in Raleigh, Surrey, Spenser, and others of the wits from Elizabeth's ruffling Court. Drummond of Hawthornden came here at least once on a visit to Ben Jonson; but this must have been after Shakespeare had deserted the festive board for the crested pomp of a gentlemanly life at Stratford, "coming up every term to take tobacco and see new motions."

Sombre John Webster would be here sometimes, sometimes Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Lilly, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, Day, Wilkins, Ford, Camden, Ned Drayton, Fulke Greville, Harrington, Edmund Waller, Martin, Morley, Selden, the future Bishop of Winchester, _et cetera, et cetera, et cetera_!

What a galaxy! what a feast!

It is well for your peace of mind, my good wife, that the Mermaid and its company have vanished into the dark immensity. How long would I wait, and cheerfully, for so much as a peep through the window at that glorious company!

* * * * *

Dryden claims that the Mermaid did not receive such pleasant and such witty fellows in the reigns of Bess and James as did the Royal Oak, the Mitre, and the Roebuck after the Restoration; but to me the haunts of Wycherley, Otway, Villiers of Buckingham, Wilmot of Rochester, and the periwigged bucks and bloods and maccaronies in velvets and lace of Charles the Second's dissolute Court, are, as compared with the Falstaffian Taverns of the Shakespeareans, but dull and dry dens.

So, if you will, of your grace, excuse the pun and the hasty skip, we will give these pretty gentlemen a miss, and jump at once into a fresh chapter and an account of a curious experience that once upon a time came in a tavern to me.

WAS SHAKESPEARE A SCOTSMAN?

O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child.

SCOTT.

At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more; his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze.

Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us--Bacon's _Essays_ and Donnelly's _Cryptogram_!--in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was mine host, then, of a literary turn? Ay, I had noted his gushing praise of Burns and Walter Scott; and, by the way, what was it he said about Shakespeare's visit to Edinburgh? He had shown me a letter in a book: I had been too intensely bored by his trowelled praise of Scottish lochs, Scottish mountains, haggis, parritch, usquebaugh, and Scottish poetry, to pay much heed--but yes, this must be it. Drummond's _Sonnets_, and here evidently was the letter, signed by Ben Jonson, indorsed "to my very good friend, the lairde of Hawthornden":--

Master vill,

quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my Lord Sempill his interlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits your answer:

So give him the play, And lette him awaye To your assured friend and loving servand,

BEN JONSON.

From my lodging in the canongait,

Mrch the twelft, 1619.

So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to Edinburgh too?

I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I almost cease to notice them.

Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before--though I have taken keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in--well, the land where they do raise Bacon--and found Shakespeare out.

Could it indeed be true that Shakespeare was an ignorant impostor, whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the same with intent to deceive?

To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.

Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't know.

I saw Shakespeare's _Works_ on the bookshelf, and reached the volume down. It opened at the _Sonnets_.

Ah! what exquisite music! But--what was this?

_Your_ name, from hence, immortal life shall have, Though _I_, once gone, to all the world must die.

Again in Sonnet XXXVIII.--

If my slight muse do please these curious days, The pain be _mine_, but _thine_ shall be the praise.

And in the next:--

What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is't but mine own when I praise _thee_?

Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?

And again:--

_My life hath in this line some interest._

What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to solve the mystery?

By Jove! here _was_ a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell the words

"MISTRESS MARY FITTON";

and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady of the _Sonnets_, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death--Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!

Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of _Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton_. The perfect anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly accentuated line in the whole of the _Sonnets_, was therefore something more than curious.

I next took the entire passage:--

But be contented: when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away,

_My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with me shall stay._

After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming these four lines, these words:--

"Learn ye that have a little wit y^t FRANCIS BACON THESE LINES TO MISTRESS MARY FITTON, ELIZABETH'S MAID OF HONOUR at Whitehalle, hath writt."

But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram.

It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling alphabetic signs.

Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became. My blood was a-fire, my head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels and consonants.

The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to brain fever or madness.

I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless, sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window.

It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of "fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff, stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and bartisans.

Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's feathers, glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night. The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock, looked like a match held up to show the darkness.

The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious to the scene.

The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep.

Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditative pose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I beheld an Apparition.

A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered (no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads, shone horridly.

My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair standing up round his neck like a frill.

He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror, issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the sofa.

For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely excited. I felt that something was about to be revealed to me; this was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare, Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the floor.

I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.

The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct told me we should do business.

He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness; his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps and flings and prancings.

So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest rye dangled proudly by his side.

"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson, Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord Brougham; and Chalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone, and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to suppose that the author of Shakespeare's _Plays_ was an exception?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said, "but--er--have I had the pleasure of meeting you before?"

"Bah!" said he, hastily dancing a strathspey, "ma fute is on ma native dew, ma name is Roderick; I am," he continued, drawing himself up to the full height of his figure, which was about six inches, "I am the Speerit o' Scottish Literature."

"Oh, I know you now," I said, "you're the spirit men call the Small Scotch."

"Where will ye find the Small Scotch that's fu' sax inches in height?" answered Roderick, with asperity.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said. "But I didn't ring for you, did I?"

"I'm no slave o' the ring," proudly answered Roderick, as he broke into the opening steps of a complicated sword-dance. "I came of my ain sweet will, just to improve your mind."

"That's very kind," said I; "will you take a chair, or a tumbler?"

The Spirit hissed angrily, as if a small soda had been poured over him, and I prudently abstained from further interruptions.

As some of my readers are perhaps less fluently acquainted with the Scotch than myself, I take the liberty of translating into English the conversation which ensued.

The Spirit began by asking whether I regarded Shakespeare as the greatest poet that ever lived, or as the meanest sweater that ever exploited the gifts of the helpless poor--meaning in this case Francis Bacon.

I responded that I did _not_ think Bacon a man of that sort.

"Well," continued the Spirit, "do you think that a man who could scarcely write his own name could write _Hamlet_?"

"It is a nice point," I said.

"Very well," said the Spirit, dancing a series of fantastic Highland flings in the unsubstantial air, and turning a double somersault at the finish; "if, as everybody admits, Bacon was one of the blackest scoundrels that ever lived, his mind could not have conceived the noble philosophy to which his name is attached. And if Shakespeare, as the signature to his will shows, could scarcely write his own name, he could not have written his own _Plays_."

"Same again," said I.

"Besides which," continued the Spirit, "neither Shakespeare nor Bacon was a Scotsman."

"That settles 'em," quoth I.

"Now, look at here," continued the Spirit, aggressively shaking his forefinger under my nose; "whoever wrote Shakespeare's _Plays_ must have written Shakespeare's _Sonnets_."

"Undoubtedly," said I.

"And the _Sonnets_ were dedicated by the publisher to 'W. H.,' who is styled 'the onlie begetter of these ensuing _Sonnets_.'"

"Well?"

"The publisher must have known who the author was."

"Very likely."

"And in referring to the '_onlie_ begetter,' he clearly implies that the authorship was claimed by many, and in furnishing no more than the initials of 'the onlie begetter,' he indicates that the real author had reasons for concealing the authorship."

"That may be so."

"Well, why should a man desire to conceal his authorship of such exquisite sonnets--sonnets of whose surpassing excellence he himself is so convinced that he writes--

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this,

--unless the _Sonnets_ contained matter likely to bring him into trouble? For instance, if a man had, in the fervour of his youth, poured out such warm expression of his love as the _Sonnets_ contain, and very earnestly desired, later on in life, to marry another lady, he might be anxious then that the authorship of the _Sonnets_ should be temporarily forgotten. But Bacon never did marry. And Shakespeare married young, and deserted his wife; and she survived his death. Therefore, no such motive for secrecy could have affected Bacon or Shakespeare."

At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in the _Strand Magazine_.

"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the detective."

At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went on as if nothing had happened:--

"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."

"What! The lot?"

"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon's _Essays_ and Shakespeare's _Plays_ prove that they were written by the same man. That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in the _Plays_ and the _Essays_, must have studied the law. But if he wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare's _Plays_."

"There's something in that," said I.

"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the ceiling, "we have now established these facts:--

"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called Shakespeare's _Plays_ are 'W. H.'

"Secondly, that he had an intensely painful love affair in his youth, and married another woman in his later years.

"Thirdly, that he was a lawyer by education but not by practice.

"Now, who was he? We have yet more evidence to aid us in identifying him. There's Spenser's plaint that 'our pleasant Willy,' 'the man whom Nature's self had made to mock herself and truth to imitate,' had been 'dead of late,' and 'with him all joy and merriment.' We have also the lines in the _Sonnets_:--

Make but my name thy love and love that still; And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will.