Prince Consort; the Cabinet and the Constitution," and contains an address on the death of the Prince Consort, delivered at Manchester shortly after that event; reviews (reproduced from the "Quarterly Review") of the successive volumes of Mr. Martin's "Life of the Prince Consort"; three articles on the County Franchise and its relation to political reform in England; and the much-discussed article on "Kin beyond Sea" contributed to a recent number of "The North American Review." The second volume is assigned to subjects classed as "Personal and Literary," and contains essays, partly biographical and partly critical, on Blanco White, Giacomo Leopardi, Tennyson, Wedgwood, Bishop Patteson, Macaulay, and Dr. Norman Macleod. The earliest of these essays is dated 1845 and the latest 1878, and they illustrate a long career of literary activity carried on side by side with the most exacting and exhausting public labors. Each essay is reprinted substantially in its original form, any changes of opinion on the part of the author being recorded in the form of notes; so that the collection as a whole will furnish the most authentic possible material for the study of the character and development of Mr. Gladstone's mind.

. . In the preface to his "English Actors from Shakespeare to Macready "* Mr. Henry Barton Baker describes his work as "a chronological history of actors and acting from Shakespeare to Macready." It is in reality much less than this, scarcely half the actors of the period named being treated of; while of acting, save as illustrated by the careers of individual actors, hardly anything is said. What it really comprises is a series of detached sketches of the most famous actors and actresses whose names have illuminated the annals of the British stage; and these sketches, taken together, will furnish the reader with valuable aid toward vivifying and realizing the more prominent figures that will be brought before him in any fairly complete historical account of the stage. The sketches are written with considerable skill and dramatic effect, are eminently pleasant reading, and bring together many of the best anecdotes and descriptive passages of previous annalists. "It is said," remarks the author, "that the actor's genius dies with him, and becomes merely a tradition to succeeding generations; and there is too much truth in the saying. Yet it is still possible, from the vivid word-paintings bequeathed to us by contemporaries, to clearly picture many of the famous performances of the past. Such paintings have been assiduously collected, in order to place before the reader a distinct idea of the various schools of acting, from the rise to that comparative extinction of the player's art which has taken place during the present generation."

. . . . A scheme which could hardly fail to prove useful if executed with even moderate ability is that

* English Actors from Shakespeare to Macready. By Henry Barton Baker. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Two volumes. 16m0, pp. 308, 312.

undertaken by Professor David J. Hill, of Lewisburg University, in his series of "American Authors,"* of which the volume on Bryant has been sent us. This volume is presumably a fair specimen of the series, and shows with some definiteness what will be its character. It is a fairly comprehensive compendium of the leading facts and events in Bryant's life, put together with some skill, and illustrated by citations from his published writings in prose and poetry. Little is attempted in the way of exegesis or criticism, and what little there is does not make us regret that this was not made a more prominent feature. The author's critical faculty seems to be conveniently subordinate to his appetite for practical details, and, while his book tells the reader a good deal that is interesting about Bryant's personality and mode of life, it will afford him but little help toward an understanding or appreciation of Bryant's work and place in literature.

The old aphorism which affirms that there is no royal road to knowledge is in a fair way of being disproved, in the case of science at least, by the publication of such works as Miss Buckley's "FairyLand of Science," which certainly demonstrates beyond cavil that learning's tree is not necessarily "woful." The little book consists of ten lectures that were recently delivered with cordial acceptance before a mixed audience of children and their parents, and which the author has taken the trouble to rewrite in order to eliminate those defects which are so easily compensated by gesture and experiment in viva-voce delivery. Miss Buckley is already favorably known by her excellent "Short History of Natural Science"; and the special merits which were conspicuous in that-clearness of thought, appositeness and fertility of illustration, and grace of style-are even more happily displayed in the present work, where precisely these qualities are indispensable. We have never read an exposition of the elementary principles of science which seemed to us so likely to please children while imparting very val. uable instruction; and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that Miss Buckley has made the fairyland of science quite as fascinating as that other fairy-land in which so many generations of children have delighted to wander. We can even conceive of children finding it even more fascinating; for, while it furr.ishes the indispensable stimulus to the imagination, its illustrative experiments gratify that love of striking and somewhat marvelous achievements which is generally one of the strongest of their appetites. The volume is amply and very beautifully illustrated, and contains plain directions for a number of simple experiments which almost any one can perform.

* American Authors. William Cullen Bryant. By David J. Hill. With Portrait on Steel. New York: Sheldon & Co. 18mo, pp. 240.

The Fairy-Land of Science. By Arabella B. Buckley. Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 16m0, PP. 244.

A

PAPER, of the title given at the head of this page, printed in "Appletons' Journal" for February, 1879, took the liberty of doubting whether as matter of record-o -one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime part proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres 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. It is only candid toward that paper to observe that—far from any dogmatism-it essayed TO DISCUSS, and attempted no argument, except such as seemed to show that the presumption to the contrary of that statement was founded on accident and lapse of time merely, and was without value in fact; contenting itself with de monstrating that, once this presumption was lifted, all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare was actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record.

Certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, however, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these

waters are troubled, have not failed to be called for in due course, by the publication of that paper. But they need only to be wiped away on each reappearance; 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 VOL. VI.-31

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 débris.

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 rejected by the Shakespeareans, 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, and the "Hamlet" of Saxo, had been translated; * that the law in "The Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of "crowner's quest law; admit that William Shakepeare “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";‡ granted all these— if they have anything to do with the questionand a dozen more, and we only attenuate, by the

Saxo, the Danish historian, from whom the plot of the "Hamlet" was taken, according to Whalley, who

says, in 1748, that "no translation hath yet been made," must have been read by the writer of "Hamlet" in the original. See "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.

+ "Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses," in "Appletons' Journal," April, 1879.

+ Ibid.

is of that parish, and knew Ben Jonson, and he did gather humours of men dayly whereever they came. One time as he was at a tavern at Stratford upon Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed, he makes there this extempory 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 thereabout 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 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: Now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombities 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 schoolmaster in the country.*

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, at thirty years after Milton's death, being actually all the information accessible concerning him! But to continue the search in the vicinage, we learn that there wasin 1693-a parish clerk in Stratford, who was eighty years old—that is to say, he was just three years old when Shakespeare died. It is related that, on one occasion, he was showing a stranger over the church, when, pointing to the Shakespeare monument, he said: "He was the best of his family. This Shakespeare was formerly of this

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town, bound apprentice to a butcher, but he ran from his master to London." A Rev. Mr. Richard Davies was Rector of Sandford, in Oxfordshire. He died in 1707. He kept a diary in his lifetime, and it seems that certain Stratford gossip, which found its way to Sandford, went down in this diary. Speaking of Shakespeare, he says: "He was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some time 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." Whatever this may be worth-for, of course, like the rest, it is mere second-hand and hearsay-it is fair to include in it what the law calls "general reputation," "general report," or common fame," and it is fair to offset it, at least, against that "common fame" and last hundred years or so concerning William mon reputation" which has grown up during the Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. We are made acquainted, too, with one John Jordan, a fellow townsman of William Shakespeare, who survived him. This John Jordan, we believe, is the authority for the 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 wenchwas almost anything, 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 than a reputation for " book-learning"; let us continue our search for Shakespeare's.

authority of one Beeston. Coleridge calls Aubrey an "arch gossip." Doubtless he was arch; for had it not been for him we had known absolutely nothing about

"our Shakespeare."

his village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, and there they were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it was a William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found was evidently not the one they wanted, they straight

way began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and of local tradition only stimulated them. They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.

First 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, 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 Stratfordupon-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 Stratfordupon-Avon. 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 Dugdale 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 have col

lected 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 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 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 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 everything), 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 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