people of Middlesex and vicinity had become for all England the undisputed standard. Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire, might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of these counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, and the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology.'

White seems to forget that the jargon of Warwickshire was well nigh as uncouth and barbarous as that of Northumberland or Cornwall.

Appleton Morgan says:

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant, this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When he came to London and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire, without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke— the language of his own fireside.?

And Shakespeare prefaced the Venus and Adonis with a Latin quotation from the Amores of Ovid. Halliwell-Phillipps, an earnest Shaksperean, says:

It is hardly possible that the Amores of Ovid, whence he derived his earliest motto, could have been one of his school books.3

No man can doubt that the Venus and Adonis was the work of a scholar in whom the intellectual faculties vastly preponderated over the animal. Coleridge notices

The utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst.

Says Dowden:

The subjects of these poems did not possess him and compel him to render them into art. The poet sat himself down before each to accomplish an exhaustive study of it.

Hazlitt says:

These poems appear to us like a couple of ice houses. They are about as hard, as glittering and as cold.

It is not possible for the human mind to bring these beautiful poems, written in such perfect English, so cold, so passionless, so The Shakespeare Myth, p. 41.

1 Life and Genius of Shak., p. 202.

3 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 63.

cultured, so philosophical, so scholastic, into connection with the first inventions of the boy we have seen lying out drunk in the fields, poaching, rioting, whipped, imprisoned, and writing vulgar doggerel, below the standard of the most ordinary intellect. Compare for one instant:

with

A Parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scare-crow, at London an asse.
He thinks himself great, yet an ass is his state,
Condemned for his ears with asses to mate.

Oh, what a sight it was wistly to view
How she came stealing to the wayward boy!
To note the fighting conflict of her hue!
How white and red each other did destroy!
But now her cheek was pale, and by and by
It flashed forth fire, as lightning from the sky.1

Can any one believe that these two passages were born in the same soul and fashioned in the same mind?

A rough but strong genius, coming even out of barbarian training, but thrown into daily contact with dramatic entertainments, might have begun to imitate the works he was familiar with; might gradually have drifted into play-making. But here we learn that the first heir of his invention was an ambitious attempt at a literary performance based on a classical fable, and redolent of the air of the court and the schools. It is incomprehensible.

Even Hallam, years ago, was struck by the incongruity between Shakspere's life and works. He says:

If we are not yet come to question his [Shakespeare's] unity, as we do that of "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle"-(an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity), we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theater, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.?

Emerson says:

Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those skiey sentences-aerolites which seem to have fallen out of heaven, . . . and tell me if they match."

The Egyptian verdict of the Shakesperean societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man in wide contrast. . . . This man of men, he who gave the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity

1 Venus and Adonis. 2 Introduction to Literature of Europe.

ity some furlongs forward in chaos- it must ever go into the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.1

Such a proposition cannot be accepted by any sane man.

Francis Bacon seems to have had these plays in his mind's eye when he said:

If the sow with her snout should happen to imprint the letter A upon the ground, wouldst thou therefore imagine that she could write out a whole tragedy as one letter ??

1 Representative Men, p. 215.

Interpretation of Nature.

CHAPTER III.

THE REAL CHARACTER OF WILLIAM SHAKSPERE.

What a thrice-double ass

Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,

And worship this dull fool.

Tempest, v, 1.

WE

E have seen that the Plays must have been written by a scholar, a man of wide and various learning.

We have seen that William Shakspere, of Stratford-on-Avon, could not have acquired such learning in his native village, and that his pursuits and associates in London were not favorable to its acquisition there; and that there is no evidence from tradition or history, or by the existence of any books or papers, or letters, that he was of a studious turn of mind, or in anywise scholarly. We have further seen that the families of his father and mother were, and had been for generations, without exception, rude and bookless. Now let us put together all the facts in our possession, and try to get at some estimate of the true character of the man himself.

He was doubtless, as tradition says, "the best of that family." His career shows that he was adventurous, and what we call in America "smart." His financial success demonstrates this fact. He had probably a good deal of mother wit and practical good sense. It is not impossible that he may have been able to string together barbaric rhymes, some of which have come down to us. But conceding all this, and a vast gulf still separates him from the colossal intellect made manifest in the Plays.

I. SHAKSPERE WAS A USURER.

The probabilities are that he was a usurer.

Richard Grant White (and it is a pleasure to quote against Shakspere so earnest a Shaksperean -one who declares that every man who believes Bacon wrote the Plays attributed to Shakspere should be committed at once to a mad-house) - Richard Grant White says:

The following passage, in a tract called Ratsei's Ghost, or the Second Part of his Mad Prankes and Robberies, of which only one copy is known to exist, plainly refers, first to Burbadge and next to Shakespeare. This book is without date, but is believed to have been printed before 1606. Gamaliel Ratsei, who speaks, is a highwayman, who has paid some strollers forty shillings for playing for him, and afterwards robbed them of their fee.1

The passage is as follows:

And for you, sirrah (says he to the chiefest of them), thou hast a good presence upon a stage, methinks thou darkenest thy merit by playing in the country; get thee to London, for if one man were dead they will have much need of such as thou art. There would be none, in my opinion, fitter than thyself to play his parts; my conceit is such of thee that I durst venture all the money in my purse on thy head to play Hamlet with him for a wager. There thou shalt learn to be frugal (for players were never so thrifty as they are now about London), and to feed upon all men; to let none feed upon thee; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket; thy heart slow to perform thy tongue's promise; and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place of lordship in the country; that growing weary of playing thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation; then thou needest care for no man; no, not for them that before made thee proud with speaking THEIR words on the stage.

Sir, I thank you (quoth the player) for this good council. I promise you I will make use of it, for I have heard, indeed, of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.

This curious tract proves several things:

The Shakspereans agree that Ratsei, in the latter part of the extract quoted, referred unquestionably to Shakspere. Ratsei, or the writer of the tract, doubtless expressed the popular opinion when he described Shakspere as a thrifty, money-making, uncharitable, cold-hearted man, "feeding upon all men," to-wit, by lending money at usurious rates of interest, for there is nothing else to which the words can apply. There can be no question that he refers to Shakspere. He was an actor; he came to London "very meanly;" he was not born there; he "lined his purse;" he had "grown exceeding wealthy;" he "bought a place of lordship in the country," where he lived "in dignity and reputation." And doubtless Ratsei spoke but the popular report when he said that some others "made him proud with speaking their words on the stage."

Let us see if there is anything that confirms Ratsei's estimate of Shakspere's character. Richard Grant White says:

The fact is somewhat striking in the life of a great poet that the only letter directly addressed to Shakespeare, which is known to exist, is one which asks for a loan of £30.9