The sonnet describes just such a commonplace-book as Bacon's Promus is; and Prof. Davidson adds:

Promus is the Latin for offices, that is, larder. Offices here has always seemed a strange word. Its significance appears to have been overlooked. The German translations omit it.

The real author of the Plays was a laborious student; we will see hereafter how he wrote and re-wrote his works. This sonnet shows that he must have kept commonplace-books, in which he noted down the thoughts and facts which he feared his memory could not contain, to subsequently "enrich his book" with them. With such habits he must have accumulated during his life-time a vast mass of material, the débris, the chips of the work-shop, hewn off in shaping the stately statues of his thought.

What became of them?

IV. WHERE ARE THE ORIGINAL COPIES OF THE PLAYS?

Let the reader write off one page of any one of the Shakespeare Plays, and he can then form some conception of the huge mass of manuscripts which must have been in the hands of the author. But as there is evidence that some of the Plays were re-written more than once, and "enlarged to as much again," there must have been, in the hands of the author, not only these original or imperfect manuscript copies, but the final ones as well. Moreover, there had been seventy-two quarto editions of the Plays. These, even if imperfect and pirated, as it is claimed, were

His children, nursed, delivered of his brain;

and if the Stratford man was really the father of the Plays, and believed that

Not marble,

Nor the gilded monuments of princes,
Should outlive this powerful rhyme,

what would be more natural than that he should take with him to Stratford copies of these quarto editions? Can we conceive of a great writer withdrawing to his country residence, to live out the remainder of his life, without a single copy of the works which had given him wealth, fame and standing as a gentleman?

And if he possessed such books, commonplace-books and manuscripts, why did he not,

Dying, mention them within his will,

as the real author says the Roman citizen would a hair from the head of the dead Cæsar? For all the dust of all the Cæsars would not compare in interest for mankind with these original manuscripts and note-books; and the man who wrote the Plays knew it, and announced it with sublime audacity:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou goest.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Appleton Morgan says:

More than a century and a half of vigorous and exhaustive research, bounded only by the limits of Great Britain, have failed to unearth a single scrap of memoranda or manuscript notes in William Shakespeare's handwriting, as preparation for any one or any portion of these plays or poems.

But it will be said that this utter disappearance of the original copies, note-books, memoranda, letters, quarto editions and library is due to the destruction and waste of years.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

But certain things are to be remembered.

It must be remembered that Shakspere was the one great man of his race and blood. He had lifted his family from obscurity to fame, from poverty to wealth, from the condition of yeomanry to that of pretended gentry; all their claims to consideration rested upon him; and this greatness he had achieved for them not by the sword, or in trade, but by his intellectual genius. Hence, they represented him, in his monument, with pen in hand, in the act of writing; hence, they placed below the monument a declaration in Latin that he was, "In judgment, a Nestor — in genius, a Socrates-in art, a Maro," and an English inscription which says that

All that he hath writ

Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.

His daughter Susanna was buried with these lines upon her tomb:

Witty above her sex, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall;
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss.

His genius was more or less the subject of comment even while he lived and soon after his death.

We are told, in the preface to the quarto edition of Troilus and Cressida, published in 1609, that Shakespeare's Plays are equal to the best comedy in Terence or Plautus.

And, believe this, that when he is gone and his Comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition.

In 1662, forty-six years after his death, and eight years before the death of his grand-daughter Elizabeth, wife of Sir John Barnard, the vicar of Stratford proceeded to note down the traditions about him.

How comes it, then, that this family — thus made great by the genius of one man, by his literary genius; conscious of his greatness; aware that the world was interested in the details of his character and history should have preserved no scrap of his writing; no manuscript copy of any of his works; no quarto edition of the Plays; no copy of the great Folio of 1623; no book that had formed part of his library; no communication addressed to him by any one on any subject; no incident or anecdote that would have illustrated his character and genius? They had become people of some note; they lived in the great house of the town. One son-inlaw was a physician, who had preserved a written record of the diseases that came under his observation; his grand-daughter Elizabeth, in 1643, entertained Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles, the reigning monarch, and daughter of the great King Henry IV. of France. The Queen remained in Shakspere's house, New Place, for three weeks, on her progress to join King Charles at Oxford. The Plays of Shakespeare were the delight of King Charles' court. We are assured by Dryden that Shakespeare was greatly popular with "the last King's court"- that of King James and that Sir John Suckling, and the greater part of the courtiers, rated him "our Shakespeare," far above Ben Jonson, “even when his (Jonson's) reputation was at the highest."

Could it be possible that the Queen and courtiers would find themselves in the house of the author of Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and yet ask no questions about him? And if they did, what more natural than for his grand-daughter to produce the relics she possessed of the great man the letter of compliment

which King James, the King's father, had written him, as tradition affirms. Kings' letters were not found on every bush in Stratford. And such memorials, once presented to the inspection of the curious, would never again be forgotten.

Would not a sweet and gentle and cultured nature have left behind him, in the bosom of his family, a multitude of pleasant anecdotes, redolent of the wit and humor that sparkle in the Plays? And, once uttered, the world would never permit them to die. No accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world has ever lost.

We are told, by Oldys, that when his brother, in his latter years, visited London, he was beset with questions by the actors touching his illustrious relative, held by them in the highest veneration; but he could tell them nothing. Would not similar questions be propounded to his family? His nephew, the son of his sister, was an actor in London for years, but he, too, seems to have had nothing to tell. We know that Leonard Digges, seven years after his death, refers to the "Stratford monument." Interest in him was active.

Dr. Hall's diary of the patients he visited, and the diary of lawyer Green, Shakspere's cousin, concerning his petty law business, are both extant, and are pored over by rapturous students; but where are Shakspere's diary and note-books?

Neither is there any reason why his personal effects should disappear through carelessness. Dr. Hall was a man of education. He must have known the value of Shakspere's papers. His own and his father-in-law's personal property continued in the hands of Shakspere's heirs down to the beginning of the present century, having passed by will from Lady Barnard in 1670 to the heirs of Joan Hart, Shakspere's sister. This was long after the great Garrick Jubilee had been held at Stratford, and long after the world had grown intensely curious about everything that concerned its most famous man. Surely the memorials of one who was believed by his heirs to be the rival of Socrates in genius and of Maro in art would not be permitted to be destroyed by a family of even ordinary intelligence. See how the papers of Bacon-of Bacon who left no children, and probably an unfaithful wife - have come down to us: the MSS. of his books; great piles of letters, written, most of them, not when he was Lord Chancellor, but when he was plain Master

Francis Bacon. Even his commonplace-books have found their way into the British Museum, and the very scraps of paper upon which his amanuensis tried his pen. Remember how Spedding found the original packages of the private letters of Lord Burleigh, just as they were tied up by the great Lord Treasurer's own hand, never opened or disturbed for nigh three hundred years!

In the British Museum they have the original manuscript copies of religious plays written in the reign of Henry VI., two hundred years before the time of Shakspere; but that marvelous collection has not a line of any of the plays written by the author of Lear and Hamlet.

V. THE MONEY VALUE OF THE PLAYS.

Nothing is clearer than that Shakspere was a money-getting man. He achieved a very large fortune in a pursuit in which most men died paupers. He had a keen eye to profit. He was ready to sue his neighbor for a few shillings loaned. I have shown that he must have carried on the business of brewing in New Place. He entered into a conspiracy to wrest the right of common from the poor people of the town, for his own profit.

Now, the Plays represented certain values; not alone their value on the stage, but the profits which came from their publication. They were popular.

Appleton Morgan says:

Although constantly pirated during his lifetime, it is impossible to discover that anybody, or any legal representative of anybody, named Shakespeare, ever set up any claim to proprietorship in any of these works― works which beyond any literary production of that age were (as their repeatedly being subjects of piracy and of registration on the Stationers' books proves them to have been) of the largest market value.

Why should the man who sued his neighbors for petty sums like two shillings pass by, in his will, these sources of emolument? But it may be said he had already sold the plays and poems to others. This answer might suffice as to those already printed, but there were seventeen plays that never saw the light until they appeared in the Folio edition of 1623, published seven years after his death. He must have owned these. Why did he make no provision in his will for their publication- if not for glory, for gain? It may be said that John Heminge and Henry Cundell, who appear to have put forth the Folio of 1623, are mentioned in his will, and that