PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

UT, having taken the liberty of doubting whether--as matter of record--one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion that--once this presumption is lifted--all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record: let us proceed to inquire whether--on review--a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these waters are troubled--which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas can so infallibly anticipate.

Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely {064}rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the "Menæchmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in "Othello" and the stanza of Berni's _Orlando Innamorato_ were mere coincidences; or, better yet, admit that there was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakespeare's day *--admit, if required--that the "Hamlet" of Saxo, had been translated; that the law in "The

* When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little variation, this stanza of the _Orlando Innamorato_ of which poem, to this day, there is no English version.

"Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione,

E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello;

Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l'altrai patiehe si fa bello,

Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;

E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?"

As no English translation has been made of the Orlando Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the original to be content with this rendering of the above stanza:

"The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring,

Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation,

And may be justly called a robberling;

But he who takes away a reputation And pranks in feathers from another's wing His deed is robbery--assassination,

And merits punishment so much the greater As he to right and truth is more a traitor."

Shakespeare, by R. G. White, vol. I, p. 23.

** Of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the plot of the "Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in 1748, that "no translation hath yet been made," must have been read by the writer of "Hamlet" in the original. "An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By Peter Whalley, A. B.,

Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Waller at the Crown and Mitre, 1748--And see a suggestion that the "Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the Double Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr. Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878. Also, "Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and London. 1874.

{065}"Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of "crowner's quest" Jaw; admit that William Shakespeare "had the advantages in school of something more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit that "his devotion to his family drove him forth from the rural seclusion of Stratford into the battle of the great world;" that the immortal gift of the second-best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation if he can thereby prove his William to have been a prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway without loss of time, and that little Susannah was as much of a surprise to William as to any body--in other words, that Anne was "no better than she should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the premature Susannah" was William Shakespeare's favorite child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will);or even that--according to Steevens, that testamentary second thought was actually "a mark of rare confidence and devotion;" granted all these--if they have anything to do with the question--and a dozen more, and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, {066}the mountain of probability, nothing less than the complete dilapidation and disappearance of which could leave room for substitution, In the stead of the probability, the _possibility_ of such a suspension of the laws of nature as is required by the Shakespearean theorists. For, as we have said, the evidence is cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment of, this or that or the other item--or disintegration of this or that or the other block--of evidence than the Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some centuries, the petty Roman princes built their palaces from its debris.

And we may as well remark that, just here, it is always in order to mention Archbishop Whately's "Historic Doubts." We wish some of the gentlemen who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read that clever little book. It is a logical, not a whimsical effort. It was intended by its author as an answer to "Hume's Essay on Miracles." Hume's argument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, reducible to the proposition that miracles were impossible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote his little work to show that the history of Napoleon was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned characters, would read like the most extravagant fable. Surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the difference between the Archbishop's brochure and the proposition of "The Shakspearean Myth!" The one was the argument from improbability, applied to facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether vicious character. The other is the demonstration {067}that history--that the record--when consulted, is directly fatal to a popular impression, and directly contradictory of a presumption, born of mere carelessness and accident, and allowed to gather weight by mere years and lapse of time.

But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and take still bolder ground. Instead of sifting evidence and counting witnesses, let us assume that, when we painted William Shakspeare--who lived between the years 1564 and 1616--as an easy-going rural wag, with a rural wit, thereafter to be sharpened by catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, who chose the life of "a vagabond by statute"--i. e. a strolling player--but who turned up in London, and found his way into more profitable connection with a permanent play-house; and, in his advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid--we had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like every other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean theme, yet one more William Shakespeare; so that, instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares, no two of which were identical, there were now ten thousand and one! Admitting _that,_ the next question would of necessity be--and such an investigation as the present must become utterly valueless if prosecuted with bias or with substitution of personal opinion for historical fact--whose William Shakespeare is probably most a likeness of the true William Shakespeare, who _did_ wander from Stratford to London, who _did_ sojourn there, and who _did_ wander back {068}again to Stratford, and there was gathered to his fathers, in the year 1616?

The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a student of Greek manuscripts and classic manners, of southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and amenities of courtly society! Which of these two portraits is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to History.

There appears to be but one way to go about to discover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he was. How, it happens that the very nearest we can come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of William Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memoranda, between February, 1662, and April, 1663, say forty-seven years after William Shakespeare's death. The following meager references to his late fellow-townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he had two daughters, etc.; and another memorandum, "Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, etc.,) thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz:

"I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that he had an allowance so large that {069}he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard."

"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted."

Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman named Aubrey. This Mr. Aubrey was himself a native of Warwickshire; was born in 1627--that is, eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gentleman commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, and so, presumably, was no Puritan. He was considerable of a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, a Latin poet of no mean abilities, he was admitted a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1646; and so, a scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know the difference between a wag and a genius. His manuscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. He gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward's, nearer to the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle extant, (Malone admits it was not written later than 1680), we give it entire:

"Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. There was, at this time, another butcher's son in that towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. This Wm. being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, {070}and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. The humour of the Constable in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' he happened to take at Gremlon, in Bucks, * which is the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that Constable, about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish, and knew him.

* Aubrey says, in a note at this place: "I think it was a midsummer's night that he happened there. But there is no Constable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probably intended reference to Dogberry, in the "Much Ado."

Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came. One time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there this extemporary epitaph:=

```Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,

```But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows.

```If any one asks who lies in this tomb,

```"Hoh," quoth the Devil, "'tis my John a Combe!"=

He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was {071}wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; says Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.' His comedies will remain witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles _mores hominum_: How our present writers reflect much upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not be understood. Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in the country." *

* Aubrey's MSS. was called "Minutes of Lives," and was addressed to his "worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680, accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: "'T is a task that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high."

Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare!" Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author of "Paradise Lost;" "He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And conceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being {072}actually all the information accessible concerning him!

But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter was discovered among the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, and indorsed by this latter, "From Mr. Dowdall; description of several places in Warwickshire"--as it bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county--the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc.--it has always been accepted as authentic. After a description of the tomb and resting place of "our English tragedian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues:

"The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * He says that this Shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and there {073}was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him."

* I.e. (more than "above" three years old when she died.) This letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifford, which were sold by auction--and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well- known antiquarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street, London, in 1834. Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in 1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year). It is dated "Butler's Merston in Warwickshire, April, the 10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your very faithful kinsman and most aff'te humble serv't till death, John at Stiles," and is addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv't." This is Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his handwriting, "From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was "an Inns'-of-Court-Man."

Next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton, * in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to his friend's manuscripts. Among these annotations he writes the following of William Shakespeare: "William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great that he is his 'Justice Clodpate' ** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor he became a composer. He died April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford--for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd.)

* His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman (in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in the library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.

** Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in "Merry Wives of Windsor." p. 520.

{074}on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. He died a papist. Whatever these may be worth--for, of course, like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay--it is fair to include them in a collection of what the law calls "general reputation," "general report," or "common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, at least, against that "common fame" and "common reputation" which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone and the Ireland forgeries as "the Stratford poet,") who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakespeare and others (as representing Stratford) against the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition is of no value except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions, associates, and contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench--was almost any thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been created since by those who knew him not. Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we {075}have remarked, than a reputation for "book-learning;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's.

When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean drama--first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will.

But the statement is the nearest and best evidence {076}we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.

First (for Rowe has only--in his eight honest pages of biographical notice--narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and Condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report--but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford "Shaughraun," the further away he got from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far from concluding that--because he finds no such name as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla--{077}therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand their business. He says:

"That almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [William Shakespeare's] death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be contemplated without astonishment. *... Sir William Dugdale, born in 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 'The Antiquities of Warwickshire,' appeared in 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, we might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not given us a single particular of his private life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his account of the church and tombs of Stratford-upon-Avon.

* Malone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," London, 1821, vol. ii, p. 4.

* Ibid., p. 5.

The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller's 'Worthies,' folio, 1662; in 'Warwickshire,' page 116--where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699--add anything to the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not {078}have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion."

The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the Worshipful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept--would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut--namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were {079}certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty--without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and--except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone--passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song--though he might have begged his bread in their streets--at least did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that there _was_ any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed--as we shall come to consider further on--for the benefit of non-theater-goers!

But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all the records--that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time--the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. But how {080}about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a riddle. It is the simplest of facts--the simple fact that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century.

But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds--and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task--to construct an immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!--one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revis{081}ited his native haunts--on the lookout, not for king's and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes--but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the {082}Stratford' butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.

* It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue and choruses of the "Henry V." and "Henry VIII." are apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly of the multitude they catered to. As to the internal testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any reader can judge for himself. We have expressed our own opinion as being that William Shakespeare might be credited with the characters of Nym and Bar-dolph; especially of the Corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, "There's the humor of it," intruded at each convenient interval; and it is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time; and that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the changes on it as a season to stage material. Witness the following:

Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, sir!

Cash. Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st.

Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that humor? Some rare thing, I warrant.

Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly.

Cob. How must it be fed?

Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou never hear that? It's a common phrase, "Feed thy humor."

Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4.

Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable Chiefly to such as had the happiness Daily to see how the poor innocent word Was racked and tortured.

Every Man Out of his Humor.

"Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused word of these times; just as for example "awful" might be said to be an over-used and abused word during our own times.

But he was searching, not for a butcher's son, but for a poet--for a courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,=

````The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

````The glass of fashion and the mold of form,

````The observed of all observers"--=

for "an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown;" * and his instinct should have assured him that.--however the works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the name of the butcher's boy--it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them; that the composer of pages "from which, were all the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," ** was {083}no "jack-of-all-trades," and could not have lived and publicly presented his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students--in the age and days of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth--unknown save to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their mouths!

* Whalley.

** Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity--to be found in the Shakespearean dramas--with the least noticed facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we might allude to here: In one of Jules Verne's realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific phenomena--"Michael Strogoff"-- he makes Michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be blinded. The blinding is to be accomplished with a heated iron, but Michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. So, in "King John," Act IV.,