descension to the common man. Are crowds steadfast, cleanly, reasonable and to be trusted? Which of us has a congenital yearning for the submerged tenth? And is not Shakespeare really as fair, if not fairer, than you or I to the man in the street? As to religion, Shakespeare is tender to priests of the old faith and respectful to the oracle at Delphi. That delightful man and sound scholar, Sir Walter Raleigh, alas that we must say late professor of literature at Oxford, used to remark that it is to the credit of human discernment that nobody has as yet called Shakespeare a Puritan. Depend upon it, somebody will, and with no great difference in the measure of his folly to that of some who have called him by other hard names. Can it be that Shakespeare is so veritably of the right religion that you and I, each in his diverse faith, feel sure that he belongs only in our own orthodox camp? The very crown of Shakespeare's reticence, however, lies in the almost unparalleled circumstance among writers that he talks little of his art and not at all about himself. These matters he has considerately left to his commentators and the critics, this being, alas, what the lawyers call" an exhibit " of what we make of it.

Lastly, as I never remember to have said anything about Shakespeare anywhere without being drawn aside by somebody and asked in confidence my opinion as to whether he wrote his own plays, I shall forestall this anxious inquiry here with a public answer. Like so many better things, this opinion of mine is taken from Life. However, as I myself gave it Life I shall offer no apology for the query.

WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE? 3

M'sieur Lefranc, who hails from Paris,

Following a Mr. Harris,

More or less,

Believes that Shakespeare's dramas are by
William Stanley Earl of Darby:
That's his guess.

M'sieur Demblon, who likewise French is,
Holds, of dates and facts, such wrenches
Under ban;

Sure as Elsinore's not Jutland,

Roger Manners Earl of Rutland

3 Reprinted by permission of the Publishers from Life, September 20,

1920.

XII

AMERICA'S ELIZABETHAN HERITAGE

T IS MY happy vocation to live in daily touch

IT

with the writings of a great age, to seek somewhat to understand the circumstance and conditions of the times of the great Queen Elizabeth, whose subjects did a bewildering number of remarkable things in nearly everything in which a man can be remarkable, and produced incidentally the greatest literature, in all the qualities that make literature great, which the world has as yet brought forth. My shop is a delightful one and full of curiosities and rarities; but it is also, let me hope, a shop open to daylight and the sun, and significant, in that what it holds is related to the rest of mankind, and especially, I believe, to this new, free, hopeful, careless, blundering and beloved America of ours. It is where the crossroads meet and peoples fuse that history is made, and new nations. Periclean Athens, republican Rome, Elizabethan England, and now our new America: man is always man and our inheritances are strong upon us. In the bewildering make-up of what we denominate America, it is not always easy to unravel three or four threads in a tangled skein. But our government, our political ideals, our procedure at law, the forms which our Christianity has pre

vailingly taken, our social manners and customs are fundamentally English, despite all foreign tinges and tinctures and, being English, were sometime derivable from conditions and characteristics intrinsic in the days of the great queen. My topic, in a word, is America's Elizabethan Heritage.

A few years since, during the war, a clever and somewhat exasperating writer put forth a book entitled The American Language. In it he carefully contrasted literary and cultivated English, as written and spoken by those who speak it best in England, with our American tongue as" she is spoke " in what used to be called the Bowery in New York's East Side; and of course he found a marked, if not an appalling, contrast. Somebody has recently translated the Bible into Chicagoese, that the hooligans of that leading criminal city of the world may come by reading to repentance. This "language" is quite unlike the English of the Authorized Version, and perhaps, outside of Chicago, to cultivated people a foreign tongue. And this is all very well. But why should not our Mr. Mencken have contrasted the cultivated speech of, let us say Boston or cosmopolitan New York, with the costermongers' jargon of East London or that of the Southampton dockyards? The contrast would have been at least as great and the comparison quite as enlightening. Differences are obvious; my concern is with similarities, not diversities, whether of trait or of long usage. It is the inheritances of common traits, yearnings and aspirations that make a people one and perpetuate in new nations, sprung from a common stock, the qualities