thoroughly well. Hang it, make some allowance for the difference of circumstances ! Besides, I'm in love, and that alters a man-and, I have heard some people say, not always for the better. Anyhow, I've done it with Farnaby, and it can't be undone. There will be no peace for me now, till I have spoken to Regina. I have read the note you left for me. Did you see her, when you called at the house?'

He

The quiet tone in which the question was put surprised Rufus. had fully expected, after Regina's reception of him, to be called to account for the liberty that he had taken. Amelius was too completely absorbed by his present anxieties to consider trivial questions of etiquette. Hearing that Rufus had seen Regina, he never even asked for his friend's opinion of her. His mind was full of the obstacles that might be interposed to his seeing her again.

'Farnaby is sure, after what has passed between us, to keep her out of my way if he can,' Amelius said. 'And Mrs. Farnaby, to my certain knowledge, will help him. They don't suspect you. Couldn't you call again -you're old enough to be her father

and make some excuse to take her out with you for a walk?'

The answer of Rufus to this was Roman in its brevity. He pointed to the window, and said, 'Look at the rain.'

'Then I must try her maid once more,' said Amelius resignedly. He took his hat and umbrella. 'Don't leave me, old fellow,' he resumed as he opened the door. This is the turning-point of my life. life. I sadly want a friend.'

'Do you think she will marry you against the will of her uncle and aunt?' Rufus asked.

'I'm certain of it,' Amelius answered. With that he left the room.

Rufus looked after him sadly. Sympathy and sorrow were expressed in every line of his rugged face. 'My poor boy! how will he bear it, if she says No? What will become of him, if she says Yes?' He rubbed his hand irritably across his forehead, like a man whose own thoughts were repellent to him. In a moment more, he plunged into his pockets, and drew out again the letters introducing him to the secretaries of public institutions. 'If there's salvation for Amelius,' he said, 'I reckon I shall find it here.'

T is surprising how little wit and

IT

less knowledge is required, as the stock-in-trade of a writer on the Shakspearian Mythology! To resolve WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE into an actor and nothing but an actor, an occasional writer of doggrel verses and nothing but doggrel verses, a jolly boon companion of limited wit, and more than questionable morality, would be regarded by most men as an arduous task. To take all the rich product of imagination, fancy, judgment and dramatic insight which has ever gone by the name of Shakspeare's plays, and to endow Sir Francis Bacon, or some unknown gentlemen of his time with their authorship, appears also no light undertaking. And yet Mr. Appleton Morgan, in the June number of Appleton's Journal, accomplishes the first achievement entirely to his own satisfaction, and, apparently, only refrains from the other through a superabundant modesty. Let us see what is the method he employs, and what are the arguments with which he would fain have us convinced.

Certainly the method is a simple one, and can be easily imitated by any person who wishes to get rid of the obtrusive personality of any other of the world's great poets. Probably, to our too-sensitive age and to etherial minds such as Mr. Appleton Morgan's, the physical existence of the poet is a blemish on his poetry. The idea of the creator of a Hamlet eating his dinner or buying a house, or a quarter of malt, is too disgustingly material to be endured with patience. Away with such nauseous embodiments from our sight! If we cannot hope to prove that the poems or plays wrote themselves, in

mercy's name, let us assure ourselves that we don't know who did write them; let us attribute our Iliad and our Othello to companies of anonymous minstrels and gentlemen; let us at all hazards sublime away the hand of flesh which has been reputed to have traced these glowing words, and gift our devotion, our gratitude, and our love, on a wreath of rose-coloured mist which may (or may not) be supposed to envelope Bacon or Raleigh!

If we set this end before us, we shall find Mr. Appleton Morgan's plan the best, nay, the only one open to us. We shall take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the one side of this imaginary line we shall copy down from all the Shakspearian collections that suit our purpose, such facts as relate to Shakspeare's private life, his slight education, his deer-stealing expedition, his holding horses at the theatre door, his playing minor parts on the stage, his comfortable burgess-like retirement in after life, and all the little scraps of doggrel that wooden-headed compilers have gathered together and attributed to him. This array of fact and fiction we shall label with a flourish of trumpets, the Real Shakspeare. Lest it be thought I am exaggerating, I will quote the last words of Mr. Morgan's paper, when he sums up his conclusion that the ideal Shakspeare is a mere creation of the stage: 'Let us not rob the stage of its own creations; and whatever he was-poet or actor-philosopher or country gentleman-thatout of a vagabond, a nobody, a nothing at all the stage created William Shakspeare' an inelegant and badly constructed sentence, it is true, but one

which tells too clearly what the whole paper has been labouring to prove, that, in Mr. Morgan's eyes, the living Shakspeare was a 'nobody,' who could not have written the plays that have gone by his name except by a miracle.

But, I hear some reader exclaim, what does Mr. Appleton Morgan do with the other half of his sheet of paper? Are there no facts to go down on the per contra side, no flattering allusions to Shakspeare's fame by his contemporaries, no references to his inner and his higher life, no traces of friendship and acquaintance'ship with the great? How does Mr. Appleton Morgan get over these?

I am much afraid, good reader, you will never make a promising myth hunter. The born sleuth-hound, nosing a mystery where none exists, will follow his own red-herring track, though it were a month old, and though the real game had crossed the path a few yards before his nose. Mr. Appleton Morgan is not easily 'thrown out' into the right line, and he manages this, partly by ignoring facts, and partly by quibbling away those which he does not think fit to ignore. us come down to examples.

Let

Ben Jonson wrote ten lines as a dedication to the first folio edition of Shakspeare's works (1623) referring to a portrait of the author. They are too well known to need quotation, but I may remind my readers that they refer to Shakspeare as the writer of the book, which they inferentially extol by saying that could the author's wit have been expressed in the engraving, it would have surpassed

All that was ever done in brasse.'

The testimony afforded by these lines is sufficiently wiped out, according to Mr. Appleton Morgan, by a comic description of the engraving, which is certainly somewhat wooden in its lack of expression and texture. Unfortunately, however, for the myth, this wretched Ben Jonson was not satisfied with writing these

He ac

abominably mistaken verses. tually wrote a longer poem on the occasion of Shakspeare's death, containing no less than eighty verses. The whole of it bears upon the point at issue. Mr. A. Morgan ingenuously quotes three lines and a half of it, and those by no means the most destructive of his theory. Let us see what this poem does tell us about Shakspeare. In the first place it is addressed to the memory of my beloved master William Shakspeare and what he hath left us.' It tells us that, in the opinion of Jonson (no mean judge), Shakspeare's writings cannot be praised too much. It calls him soul of the age! a hyperbole, if addressed to an actor, but no hyperbole addressed as it was to an immortal author. It proceeds to show how needless it were to bid Chaucer, Spenser, or Beaumont crowd their bones together to make room for his monument, for none is needed, Shakspeare lives while we have wits to read' his book. In short it dares compare him with 'thund'ring Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles,' or any 'that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth.' 'He was not of an age, but for all time.' After paying a tribute to the share both of nature and of art in his poetry, it dubs him 'Sweet Swan of Avon,' 'Star of poets,' and refers to his

flights upon the Bank of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James.'

Jonson was one of Shakspeare's most intimate companions. No one contradicted the assertions he made in this poem, and we must, therefore, presume that it fairly embodied the opinion of his age. How does Mr. A. Morgan get rid of this testimony? He quotes Brougham, and the remark is worthy of that great would-be critic's superficial style of thought, oh, these fellows always hang together; or its just possible Jonson may have been deceived with the rest.'

6

Fellows, forsooth! Is even a Brougham, let alone a Mr. Appleton Morgan,

to be allowed to treat the tribute of a 'rare Ben Jonson' to a SHAKSPEARE in the same spirit as an old Bailey lawyer would the testimony of one gaol-bird swearing through an alibi for another? Even Mr. Morgan's not over-squeamish stomach prefers the other alternative, but the quibbling spirit of the pettifogger clings to him and he adds,

and these poets do not swear to their verses.' In future, no doubt, poets will be more careful. It is a great pity that the hint did not come before. Shelley's Adonais, and Milton's Lycidas would have been much improved, crede Mr. Appleton Morgan, by the introduction of the verbose phraseology of the chancery practitioner, his "as I am informed and believe," "to the best of my knowledge," and the jurat at the end of all by way of peroration! Faugh! the bare idea sickens one, and nothing but a draught of nectar can take the taste from off offended lips.

Mr. Appleton Morgan gives, in a note, a passage of Grant-White's containing quotations from Spenser, Meres, and Digges, all alluding to Shakspeare as an author, in terms of high eulogy, and in the case of Meres distinctly speaking of him as the author of the plays. This is really the first piece of straightforward behaviour on his part that I have met in his paper. The manner in which he attempts to meet it is not very creditable to him. It amounts to this. History has, most culpably, omitted to preserve (on affidavit of course, nothing less would have availed) the statement of the messenger or printer's devil who took the "copy" of the plays to the publishers. That is the missing link. Never mind how many hundreds of men thought Shakspeare wrote them, no matter how many of his contemporaries said that he wrote them, disregard the fact that no one contradicted this, and no one else claimed to have been their author in the absence of an intelligent witness (always on oath) who saw Shakspeare write them and took them to the press, we can believe nothing at

all about their origin. This is a pretty conclusion to come to and possibly accounts for much of Mr. A. Morgan's wilful shutting of his eyes to contemporary evidence. For besides the writers mentioned in the footnote already referred to, Aubrey refers to his wit, Drummond (who knew them both) contrasted him favourably with Ben Jonson, and that pestilent fellow, Jonson himself, has left it on record in another place that "he loved the man and honoured his memory on this side idolatry as much as any." Nor are

these all.

William Basse, in his short elegy, makes use of the figure about Spenser, Chaucer and Beaumont, making room for Shakspeare which, as we have already seen, Ben Jonson afterwards turned to account in his elegy, by declaring such a proceeding quite unnecessary. Hugh Holland's sonnet is addressed to the famous scenic poet'-calls him 'the poet first, then poets' king,' and prophesies that though his life is expired, the life of his lines 'shall never out.' Digges' verses, on the publication of the first folio, are pregnant and instinct with the belief that the book was Shakspeare's own. Shakspeare, he says, will never really die until some 66 new strain outdoes his Romeo and Juliet or the quarrel scene in Julius Cæsar. That new strain has never yet been heard, but we have some amongst us who would fain have us believe that Shakspeare never "really" lived. Yet once again, Chettle, in his Kinde Hart's Dreame' (1592) commends Shakspeare's "facetious grace in writing, that approves his art," and acknowledges that "divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing." These men of quality who knew and loved him were, of course, all mistaken.

Mr. Appleton Morgan, who has, naturally, infinitely better materials for arriving at a just conclusion, has convicted this' upright' man of swallowing all this praise, and presumably some substantial pudding to boot, while well knowing that all his part

in the plays was possibly the characters or some of the speeches of Nym, Bardolph, and the Porter in Macbeth.

This brings us to consider a grave charge against Mr. Appleton Morgan. His paper teems with expressions such as Shakspeare's 'vagrom youth,'' the drunken grave of the Stratford pretender,' the scissorer of other men's brains,' and, as we have already seen, 'the vagabond, nobody, nothing-at-all.'

How does Mr. Morgan reconcile this with the vagabond's' intimacy with the great and good of the Court of Elizabeth? He reconciles these facts by ignoring them. Still, I, for one, will believe Chettle's and Ben Jonson's testimony in spite of Mr. Morgan's contemptuous silence, the more especially as I find the 'Venus and Adonis' and Lucrece,' both preceded by dedications to the Earl of Southampton, signed by Shakspeare and containing clear evidence of love and respect on both sides, not to be in any way confounded with the stereotyped phrases of a later day when patrons paid for so much meaningless compliment by the epithet. Mr. Morgan is therefore in this dilemma. Either the 'scissorer of other men's brains' had such a hold over his unknown author, the possible-probable-BaconRaleigh dramatist, that he could at pleasure get such poems as these or the sonnets from him, besides the plays or else the absurd farrago of scraps (such as Shakspeare's epitaph), which Mr. Morgan would fain see published as the Complete Works of W. Shakspeare,' must be enlarged by these noble poems. I will not now expatiate on the difficulties he will land himself in if he claims that one hand wrote the plays and another hand the poems, but will leave him to chose his horn and perch on it

With what appetite he may.

One point more I will touch upon : and that is the argument derived from Shakspeare's ignorance, or rather supposed ignorance. Granted his poetical

genius,' says Mr. Morgan, and where did he get the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical information, &c., -the facts that crowd his pages ?' Mr. Morgan's difficulty is self-imposed.

To prove Shakspeare was not a genius he postulates that he was an ignoramus, and conducts his syllogism to a triumphant close. Has he never heard of the vast impetus to learning that had just struck England as with a wave? Has he never read any of our great descriptions of the awakening effect of the Renaissance on men's minds? Does he think that girls and ladies could saturate their minds with Greek and Roman literature, that translations of classical masterpieces could pour from the presses of Holland and England, of Italy and France, and yet that a poet, living among the most educated and enterprising courtiers of the civilised world could have escaped the contagion ?

Is he unaware of the mass of knowledge as to history and philosophy that had been made public in the one department of the drama before Shakspeare so much as touched a pen? Has he never read a single sermon of our English divines, of Latimer or Lever, or reading them has he failed to notice the wealth of thought and illustration that is conveyed, and the intelligence which such oratory presupposes the audience to possess? Has he never been told that Shakspeare had a copy of 'Montaigne' in his library, or does he flatter himself that, because no other books bearing his sign manual have been preserved to us, no others existed on his shelves? If he is aware of these facts, how dare he stigmatise Shakspeare as ignorant; if he has been unaware of them until now, how had he the presumption to attempt such a subject?

Luckily, his endeavours are about as successful as his deserts, and before he seeks again to demonstrate Shakspeare's ignorance he had better walk round the base of the great Pyramid and thence look down upon its summit.