And from such a cause, and in the midst of such surroundings, we are told, died the greatest man of his race; leaving behind him not a single tradition or memorial that points to learning, culture, refinement, generosity, elevation of soul or love of humanity.

If he be in truth the author of the Plays, then indeed is it one of the most inexplicable marvels in the history of mankind. As Emerson says, "I cannot marry the facts to his verse."

CHAPTER IV.

THE LOST LIBRARY AND MANUSCRIPTS.

Come, and take choice of all my library,

And so beguile thy sorrow.

Titus Andronicus, iv, 1.

HE whole life of Shakspere is shrouded in mystery.

THE

Richard Grant White says:

We do not know positively the date of Shakespeare's birth, or the house in which he first saw the light, or a single act of his life from the day of his baptism to the month of his obscure and suspicious marriage. We are equally ignorant of the date of that event, and of all else that befell him from its occurrence until we find him in London; and when he went there we are not sure, or when he finally returned to Stratford. . . . Hardly a word that he spoke has reached us, and not a familiar line from his hand, or the record of one interview at which he was present.1

And, again, the same writer says:

From early manhood to maturity he lived and labored and throve in the chief city of a prosperous and peaceful country, at a period of high intellectual and moral development. His life was passed before the public in days when the pen recorded scandal in the diary, and when the press, though the daily newspaper did not yet exist, teemed with personality. Yet of Dante, driven in haughty wretchedness from city to city, and singing his immortal hate of his pursuers as he fled, we know more than we do of Shakespeare, the paucity of whose personal memorials is so extreme that he has shared with the almost mythical Homer the fortune of having the works which made his name immortal pronounced medleys, in the composition of which he was but indirectly and partially concerned."

Hallam says:

Of William Shakespeare it may be truly said we know scarcely anything. While I laud the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter and other collectors of such crumbs, I am not sure that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they had left him undisturbed in his obscurity. To be told that he played a trick on a brother player in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote Lear. If there was a Shakespeare of earth there was also one of heaven, and it is of him that we desire to know something.3

This is certainly extraordinary.

It was an age of great men.

1 White, Life and Genius of Shak., p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 1. Introduction to Literature of Europe.

Richard Grant White says:

Unlike Dante, unlike Milton, unlike Goethe, unlike the great poets and tragedians of Greece and Rome, Shakespeare left no trace upon the political, or even the social life of his era. Of his eminent countrymen, Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wotton and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries; and yet there is no proof whatever that he was personally known to either of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers and artists of his day, except the few of his fellow craftsmen whose acquaintance with him has been heretofore mentioned.1

It was an age of pamphlets. Priests, politicians and players all vented their grievances, or set forth their views, in pamphlets, but in none of these is there one word from or about Shakspere.

I. WHERE ARE HIS LETTERS ?

It was an age of correspondence. The letters which have come down to us from that period would fill a large library, but in no one of them is there any reference to Shakspere.

The man of Stratford passed through the world without leaving the slightest mark upon the politics or the society of his teeming and active age.

Emerson says:

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him, and I find among his correspondents and acquaintances the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he (Wotton) saw Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlowe, Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable.

We read in a sonnet attributed to his pen that he highly valued Spenser; and we find Spenser, it is claimed, alluding to the author of the Plays; the dedications of the Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece are supposed to imply close social relationship with the Earl of Southampton; we are told Elizabeth conversed with him and King James wrote him a letter; we have pictures of him sur

Life and Genius of Shak., p. 185.

Representative Men, p. 200.

rounded by a circle of friends, consisting of the wisest and wittiest of the age; and yet there has been found no scrap of writing from him or to him; no record of any dinner or festival at which he met any of his associates. In the greatest age of English literature the greatest man of his species lives in London for nearly thirty years, and no man takes any note of his presence.

Contrast the little we know of Shakspere with the great deal we know of his contemporary Ben Jonson. We are acquainted somewhat with the career even of Ben's father; we know that Ben attended school in London, and was afterward at Cambridge; there is no evidence that Shakspere ever was a day at school in his life. We know that Jonson enlisted and served as a young man in the wars in the Low Countries. Shakspere's biography, from the time he left Stratford, in 1585-7, until he appears in London as a writer of plays, is an utter blank, except the legend that he held. horses at the door of the theater. We know all about Jonson's return home; his marriage; his duel with Gabriel Spencer. We are certain of the date of the first representation of each of his plays; there is a whole volume of matter touching the quarrels between himself and other writers. He published his own works in 1616, and received a pension from James I. We have letters extant describing the suppers he gave, his manners, weaknesses, appear

ance, etc.

But with Shakspere all this is different. Where are the letters he must have received during the thirty years he was in London, if he was the man of active mind given out by the Plays? If he had received but ten a year, they would make a considerable volume, and what a world of light they would throw upon his pursuits and character.

But two letters are extant- - those to which I have already referred: one addressed to him soliciting a loan of money; another addressed to a third party, in which he is referred to in the same connection; but there is not one word as to studies, or art, or literature, or politics, or science, or religion; and yet the mind that wrote the Plays embraced all these subjects, and had thought profoundly on all of them. He loved the art of poetry passionately; he speaks of "the elegance, facility and golden cadence of poetry;"

1 Love's Labor Lost, iv, 2.

he aspired to a "muse of fire that would ascend the highest heaven of invention;" he struggled for perfection. Had he no intercourse. with the poets of his time? Was there no mutual coming-together of men of kindred tastes and pursuits?

Is it not most extraordinary that he should leave behind him this vast body of plays, the glory and the wonder of which fills the world, and not a scrap of paper except five signatures, three of which were affixed to his will, and the others to some legal documents?

On the one side we have the Plays - vast, voluminous, immortal; covering and ranging through every department of human thought. These are the works of Shake-speare.

On the other hand, these five signatures are the sum total of the life-labors of Shak-spere which have come down to us.

In these rude, illiterate scrawls we stand face to face with the man of Stratford. What an abyss separates them from the majestic, the god-like Plays?

It is a curious fact that all the writings were put forth in the name of Shakespeare, very often printed with a hyphen, as I have given it above, Shake-speare; while in every one of the five cases where the man's signature has come down to us, he spells his name Shakspere.

In this work, wherever I allude to the mythical writer, I designate him as Shakespeare; whenever I refer to the man of Stratford, I give him the name he gave himself - Shakspere.

The history of mankind will be searched in vain for another instance where a great man uniformly spelled his name one way on the title-pages of his works, and another way in the important. legal documents which he was called upon to sign. Can such a fact be explained?

But passing from this theme we come to another question:

II. WHERE ARE HIS BOOKS?

We have seen that the author of the Plays was a man of large learning; that he had read and studied Homer, Plato, Heliodorus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dares Phrygius, Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Seneca, Ovid, Plautus, Plutarch, Boccaccio, Berni and an innumerable array of French novelists and Spanish and