L'ENVOI

Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious fame,
Content on gross and coarse applause to live,
And what the dull and senseless rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn;
Nor wouldst that wretched alms receive,

The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name.
Thine was no empty vapour, raised beneath,
And formed of common breath,

The false and foolish fire that whisked about
By popular air, and glares awhile, and then goes out;
But 'twas a solid, whole, and perfect globe of light,
That shone all over, was all over bright,

And dared all sullying clouds, and feared no
[dark'ning night.
Like the gay monarch of the stars and sky,
Who wheresoe'er he does display

His sovereign lustre, his majestic ray,
Straight all the less, and petty glories nigh
Vanish, and shrink away,

O'erwhelmed, and swallowed by the greater blaze

[of day; With such a strong, an awful and victorious beam Appeared, and ever shall appear, thy fame, Viewed and adored by all the undoubted race of wit, Who only can endure to look on it.

The rest o'ercome with too much light,

With too much brightness dazzled, or extinguished

[quite :

Restless and uncontrolled it now shall pass
As wide a course about the world as he,
And when his long repeated travels cease
Begin a new and vaster race,

And still tread round the endless circle of eternity."

(1616)

A bon entendeur, salut !

This able work has been published since the foregoing pages were written. Its author, Judge Stotsenburg, has collected a large a large number of parallel passages from the writers I have dealt with; but, curiously enough, he notes none of those which happen to have struck me.

His deductions from the facts are that the Shakespeare Plays are not the work of one single author, but of a poetic syndicate including among others, Drayton, Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Middleton, and Porter. To this group Bacon was merely a polisher and reconstructor, "a conclusion that forces itself upon my mind because first I believe that Bacon if he originated the plays would have observed the unities, and secondly because his philosophical views and his peculiarities are interwoven in some of them."

In point of fact Judge Stotsenburg tears the personality of" Shakespeare " into tatters, and allots the fragments to comparatively unheard-of men.

The flaw in this reasoning seems to me to be the supposition that any Poet could be so unsmutted with human weaknesses, as to publish his inferior work under his own name and "the immediate jewels of his soul" under that of some one else.

APPENDIX B.

A LARGER ISSUE

On December 9th 1905 there appeared in the Athenæum a letter from Mr Sidney Lee wherein he states

"I am chiefly impressed by the proofs I am accumulating of the closeness of the relations between Elizabethan literary effort and that of contemporary France and Italy; and of the community of literary taste and feeling, which almost rendered literary Europe at the end of the sixteenth century a single Commonwealth of letters.

This raises an interrogation whether the English Litterati with Bacon at their head were not associated with that great Pythagorean movement of which Gabriele Rossetti wrote as follows.

"The greatest number of those literary productions which we have hitherto been in the habit of considering in the light of amusing trifles, or amatory rhymes, or as wild visions of the romantic, or heavy treatises by the dull scholar; are in reality works which enclose recondite doctrines and secret rites; an inheritance bequeathed by remote ages, and what may to many appear mere fantastic fables are a series of historical facts expressed in ciphers which preserve the