ceremoniously degrades the accomplished scholar of Mr. Wyndham, and the hunter, the falconer, and the horseman, of Mr. Justice Madden (i. 56). From his fourteenth to his eighteenth year, Mr. Phillipps confesses himself to be utterly unable to determine the nature of his occupations (i. 57). When he was little more than eighteen, we know from the records of the Consistory Court at Worcester that he was married, under the name of Shagspere, to a woman of twenty-six, who, as Mr. Wyndham shows, was in a hurry to present him with his first-born. In 1585 she presented him with twins. When he left Stratford for London we do not positively know. The twins were baptised on the 2nd of February, 1585, and Mr. Phillipps is of opinion that he left shortly after the baptism of the twins (i. 66); Mr. Lee represents him, not as riding on horseback, but as trudging on foot' to the metropolis in 1586 (p. 28); and Professor Dowden considers that his departure from his native place could not have been earlier than 1585, and might have been a year or two later (H. I. Sh. vIII., p. xix). Mr. Phillipps adduces evidence which shows that he was at Stratford in September 1587 (i. 80). At that time his father was in danger of arrest for debt (ii. 241); his own circumstances were desperate; and, accordingly, we may safely fix the end of 1587, or the beginning of 1588, as the date of his Hegira. The extremity of his distress is shown by the meanness of the employment which

he was fain to accept when he arrived at London. Instead of representing him as riding straight to the Theatre, and claiming the privilege of a fellowtownsman from Burbage, Mr. Phillipps owns that there is not the faintest evidence that Burbage came from Stratford (ii. 344); and instead of representing him as enrolling himself forthwith in a company of players, Mr. Phillipps, seeing that the histrionic art is not learned in a day' (i. 68), came to the conclusion that, if connected in any sort of manner with the theatre immediately upon his arrival in London,' he could only have been engaged in a servile capacity' (i. 69).

Entertaining this view of his antecedents, Mr. Phillipps gives us his view of the intellectual qualifications of the young man when he arrived in London. 'Removed prematurely from school; residing with illiterate relations in a bookless neighbourhood; thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress-it is difficult to believe, that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments' (i. 83); and his Biographer holds that he could not, at all events, under the circumstances in which he had then so long been placed, have had the opportunity of acquiring a refined style of composition' (p. 85). In fact, the only composition attributed to him during his early residence at Stratford is a ballad worthy of the bell-man, in which he is said to have lampooned the gentleman

whose deer-park he had robbed, and from whose vengeance he is supposed to have fled to London.*

Nor can the picture of Mr. Phillipps be regarded as too highly coloured. Lord Macaulay, in describing the state of England in 1685, records that country gentlemen spoke the dialect of clowns, and that even the country clergy experienced the utmost difficulty in procuring books. The litter of a farmyard, he says, gathered under the windows of the bed-chamber of the lord of the manor, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall-door. Stratford was no exception to the general squalor; and Garrick, in 1769, on the occasion of the great Shakespeare celebration, described it as the most dirty, unseemly, ill-paved, wretched-looking town in all Britain.'

Mr. Lee tells us that it is 'the apparent contrast between the homeliness of Shakespeare's Stratford career, and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his literary work which has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name' (p. 307). But the contrast does not disappear by calling it apparent, and the theory is not refuted by styling it fantastic. The fantastic theory was maintained by Lord Palmerston; and John Bright was so impressed with the apparent contrast that, emulating the

*On Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Lucy, see Note A.

C

controversial civilities in vogue, he declared that any man who believes that William Shakspere of Stratford wrote Hamlet or Lear is a fool. Even the Historian of the Literature of Europe was haunted by the shadow of the question when he wrote of Shakespeare. If we are not yet come to question his unity,' says Mr. Hallam, 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 theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.'

ii

Of the Unity of Shakespeare.

R. LEE maintains that the abundance of the

MR contemporary evidence attesting Shake

speare's - that is the young Stratford man's— ' responsibility for the works published under his name gives the Baconian Theory no rational right to a hearing' (p. 309). Let us then direct our attention to the first of the questions suggested by Mr. Hallam.

To the ordinary reader the unity of Shakespeare is as indisputable as his identity with the young man who came up from Stratford. The ordinary reader regards the Poet as the one bright particular star. To him the Shakespeare of the plays, like the Shakespeare of the poems, is indivisible and one. He has no more doubt of the unity of Shakespeare than he has of the unity of Milton. And he is fully justified in this belief. The only authoritative edition of the plays of the great dramatist declares that in the Folio they are