INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB.*

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare
To dig the dust encloased here
Bless'd be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he who moves my bones.

These are all the poetical compositions William Shakespeare appears to have left behind him at his death in 1616; and there seems to be no reason why he could not have written them; and, unless he has written through a spirit medium, he has written nothing since.

It certainly would be unfair to insert, in this edition of Master Shakespeare's poetry, all that he borrowed and dressed up (and, according to Richard Greene, he borrowed and dressed up a great deal). We have already, in our former paper, quoted from Greene. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans to sneer at Greene, because he was " jealous" of Shakespeare. He appears to have had reason to be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow on poor Greene. Mr. Grant White says: "Robert Greene, writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee, warns three of his literary companions to shun intercourse with," etc., "certain actors, Shakespeare among the rest." If Robert Greene died from over-debauch, it is no more than Shakespeare himself died of, according to an entry "in the diary of the Rev. John Ward, who was appointed Vicar of Stratford in 1662,"† and according to Mr. White himself, from whom we take this reference.

"It is not impossible," says Mr. White, "that this piece of gossiping tradition is true." He is right to call it "gossiping tradition," for it is piece and parcel of all the other mention of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were not for "gossiping tradition" we had never heard, and Mr. White had never written, of that personage. But Mr. White makes no reservation of 'gossiping tradition" in the case of Robert Greene. Greene dies "on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself, as to call that "jack of all trades" an upstart crowe, beautified with our feathers," etc. To our ears we confess that poor Robert Greene's dying words -if they were his dying words-sound like an ante-mortem legacy of warning and prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But they have not been heeded. His "upstart crowe

"

* On the authority of common opinion in the vicinity of Stratford, but not traceable to any responsible source.

This entry, as given by Mr. White, is as follows: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare

died of a feaver there contracted."

has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is arrayed each passing day with somebody's richer and brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could tell us as Jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes, and they only would—whose all this plumage really was and is. But all are dust and ashes together now-dust and ashes three centuries old, and, as Miss Bacon said, "Who loses anything that does not find❞ the secret of that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, who saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer of other men's brains, and who was too human to see and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the Stratford pretender-who was vanquished in his cups at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last-they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Falstaff: "Nay, sure, he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child." But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own wife, poor Robert Greene, and perhaps the delinquent for corn delivered. He loved his own, but that is no wrong. And, so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him.

The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms with costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. And the sum is briefly this: If William Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; everything else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but, here, everything else is not equal, for all the facts of history are reconcilable with the presumption and irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, then miracle there was none-in other words, if there were one miracle, then there must have been two. If there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, that "William Shakespeare" would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to question? But to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our estimation, an innocence of credulity that is almost physical blindness!

But what is the summing up on the other side? Upon what statement is the case for the respondent to be rested? Merely that Ben Jonson (a poet) once said (in poetry) that his fellow actor was the First of Poets!!! Merely this, and nothing more. Any one who cares to examine

46

for himself will find the residue of the so-called contemporary testimony" to be rather CRITICISM, as to the compositions, than CHRONICLE, as to the man. And these poets do not swear to their verses.

In our first paper we remarked of this gentry, who are never required to make oath to what they state, that "of the contemporaries of William Shakespeare who lamented his death in verse, most of their eulogies are quite vague as to whether they considered their departed friend as an actor or a poet, and may be construed either way." Right here a critic remarks, "This is absurd," and quotes Ben Jonson's lines:

Yet must I not give nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

.

For a good poet's made as well as born, And such wert thou

which are supposed important enough to require meeting by themselves. We said "most of,” not "all." As for these lines, we understand them to have been quoted to Lord Brougham (who went further than we have gone, and asserted that Lord Bacon was the concealed author of the plays). "Oh," said Brougham, these fellows always hang together; or it's just possible Jonson may have been deceived with the rest." But the question is not "Was Shakespeare a poet ?" but " Had he access to the material from which the plays are composed?" Admit him to have been the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world, where did he get not the poetry, but-the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information—the FACTS that crowd his pages? We have presented a mass of historical evidence in these two papers, going to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford had not and could not have had such access. Are ten lines of poetry by Ben Jonson-his warm friend and fellow craftsman (not sworn to, of course, but we waive that; and we may add, not nearly as tropical or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi)—to outweigh all historic certainty? If his contemporary had written a life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk" of William Shakespeare, it might have been different. But he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical eulogy; and fact is one thing, and poetry-except in this instance, as it seems—is conceded to be altogether another.

"If I go, who remains? If I remain, who goes?" said Dante to the Council of Florence. Take the Shakespearean pages away from English literature, and what remains? Retain them, and what departs? And yet are men to believe that the writer of these pages left no impress on VOL. VI.-32

his age and no item in the chronicle of his time? * that, in the intensest focus of the clear, calm lime-light of nineteenth-century inspection and investigation, their author stands only revealed in the gossip of goodwives or the drivel of a pothouse clientage? Who is it-his reason and judgment once enlisted—who believes this thing?

Heaven forbid that we should rob the stage of Master William Shakespeare! The stage was the people's teacher then, and it is the people's teacher now. To the world it has taught-and nothing does it teach more earnestly to-day-the lesson of fortitude under adversity, of honor and of noblesse oblige; and, if for nothing else, the stage has been a godsend to the race. not rob the stage of its own creations; and, whatever he was-poet or actor, philosopher or country gentleman-THAT-out of a vagabond -a nobody-a nothing at all-the stage created William Shakespeare!

Let us

APPLETON MORGAN.

* Mr. Grant White does not admit that Shakespeare was unappreciated in his own time. He says (Appletons' " American Cyclopædia," article "Shakespeare"): had run through five editions by 1602. Buth it and "The fact is quite otherwise. His 'Venus and Adonis'

'Lucrece' are highly extolled by contemporary writers.

Spenser alludes to him in Colin Clout,' written in 1594,

as one

Whose Muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth like himself heroically sound. Francis Meres, in his 'Palladis Tamia '—1598—said that the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspeare: witness his "Venus and Adonis," his "Lucrece," his sugred sonnets among his private friends.' 'As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.' And this was before his greatest works were written. Meres adds: As Epius Stolo they would speake Latin, so I say that the Muses would said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue if speake with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they would speake English.' We know, too, that his plays were as attractive to the public as they were satisfactory to those critics who were not his rivals. Leonard Digges, born in 1588, tells us, in verses not published till 1640, that when the audience saw Shakespeare's plays they were ravished, and went away in wonder; and that, though Ben Jonson was admired, yet, when his best plays would hardly bring money enough to pay for a sea-coal fire, Shakespeare's would fill 'cockpit, galleries, boxes,' and scarce leave standing room." And yet, after citing all this testhe city and among the critics, Mr. White is honest timony to the sensation which THE PLAYS produced in enough to say, in another place in the same article,

of THE MAN Shakespeare: "A century ago George Steevens wrote, 'All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, married and had children there, poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried.' The assiduous researches of one hundred years have discovered little more than this."

went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote

therefore, is a convenient opportunity to cast a glance back upon the literary achievements of a period so markedly divided in political interest from any that went before it. The reign of Queen Victoria is the first in which the constitutional and Parliamentary system of government came fairly and completely into recognition. It is also the reign which had the good fortune to witness the great modern development in all that relates to practical invention, and more especial ly in the application of science to the work of making communication rapid between men. On land and ocean, in air and under the sea, the history of rapid travel and rapid interchange of message coincides with that of the present reign. Such a reign ought to have a distinctive literature. So in truth it has. Of course it is somewhat bold to predict long and distinct renown for contemporaries or contemporary schools. But it may perhaps be assumed without any undue amount of speculative venturesomeness that the age of Queen Victoria will stand out in history as the period of a literature as distinct from others as the age of Elizabeth or Anne, although not perhaps equal in greatness to the latter, and far indeed below the former. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign a great race of literary men had come to a close. It is curious to note how sharply and completely the literature of Victoria separates itself from that of the era whose heroes were Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. Before Queen Victoria came to the throne, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats were dead. Wordsworth lived, indeed, for many years after; so did Southey and Moore; and Savage Landor died much later still. But Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Landor had completed their literary work before Victoria came to the throne. Not one of them added a cubit or an inch to his intellectual stature from that time; some of them even did work which distinctly proved that their day was done. A new and fresh breath was soon after breathed into literature. Nothing, perhaps, is more remarkable about the better

* This chapter from Justin McCarthy's "History of Our Own Times," volumes i. and ii. of which have just been published in London, is offered as a suitable supplement to Mr. Spencer Walpole's "English Literature," which appeared in the "Journal" for February and March of the present year.-EDITOR APPLETONS' JOURNAL.

severance from leadership of that

which had gone before it, and its evidence of a fresh and genuine inspiration. It is a somewhat curious fact, too, very convenient for the purposes of this history, that the literature of Queen Victoria's time thus far divides itself clearly enough into two parts. The poets, novelists, and historians who were making their fame with the beginning of the reign had done all their best work and made their mark before these later years, and were followed by a new and different school, drawing inspiration from wholly different sources, and challenging comparison as antagonists rather than disciples.

We speak now only of literature. In science the most remarkable developments were reserved for the later years of the reign. We use the words "remarkable developments" in the historical rather than in the scientific sense. It would be hardly possible to overrate the benefits conferred upon science and the world by some of the scientific men who made the best part of their fame in the earlier years of the reign. Some great names at once start to the memory. We think of Brewster, the experimental philosopher, who combined in so extraordinary a degree the strictest severity of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy and imagination which lent picturesqueness to all his illustrations and invested his later writings especially with an indefinable charm. We think of Michael Faraday, the chemist and electrician, who knew so well how to reconcile the boldest researches into the heights and deeps of science with the sincerest spirit of faith and devotion; the memory of whose delightful improvisations on the science he loved to expound must remain for ever with all who had the privilege of hearing the unrivaled lecturer deliver his annual discourses at the Royal Institution. It is not likely that the name of Sir John Herschel, a gifted member of a gifted family, would be forgotten by any one taking even the hastiest glance at the science of our time-a family of whom it may truly be said, as the German prose-poet says of his dreaming hero, that their eyes were among the stars and their souls in the blue ether. Richard Owen's is, in another field of knowledge, a great renown. Owen has been called the Cuvier of England and the Newton of natural history, and there can not be any doubt that his researches

and discoveries as an anatomist and paleontologist have marked a distinct era in the development of the study to which he devoted himself. Hugh Miller, the author of "The Old Red Sandstone" and "The Testimony of the Rocks," the devotee and unfortunately the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought a fresh and brilliant literary ability, almost as untutored and spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman, Robert Burns, to bear on the exposition of the studies to which he literally sacrificed his life. If, therefore, we say that the later period of Queen Victoria's reign is more remarkable in science than the former, it is not because we would assert that the men of this later day contributed in richer measure to the development of human knowledge, and especially of practical science, than those of the earlier time. But it was in the later period that the scientific controversies sprang up and the school arose which will be, in the historian's sense, most closely associated with the epoch. The value of the labors of men like Owen and Faraday and Brewster is often to be appreciated thoroughly by scientific students alone. What they have done is to be recorded in the history of science rather than in the general and popular history of a day. But the school of scientific thought which Darwin founded, and in which Huxley and Tyndall taught, is the subject of a controversy which may be set down as memorable in the history of the world. All science and all common life accepted with gratitude and without contest the contributions made to our knowledge by Faraday and Brewster; but the theories of Darwin divided the scientific world, the religious world, and indeed all society, into two hostile camps, and so became an event in history which the historian can no more pass over than, in telling of the growth of the United States, he could omit any mention of the great civil war. Even in dealing with the growth of science it is on the story of battles that the attention of the outer world must to the end of time be turned with the keenest interest. This is, one might almost think, a scientific law in itself, with which it would be waste of time to quarrel.

The earlier part of the reign was richer in literary genius than the later has thus far been. Of course the dividing line which we draw is loosely drawn, and may sometimes appear to be capricious. Some of those who won their fame in the earlier part continued active workers, in certain instances steadily adding to their celebrity, through the succeeding years. The figure of Thomas Carlyle is familiar still to all who live in the neighborhood of Chelsea. It was late in the reign of Victoria that Stuart Mill came out for the first time on a public platform in London

after a life divided between official work and the most various reading and study; a life divided too between the seclusion of Blackheath and the more poetic seclusion of Avignon, among the nightingales whose song was afterward so sweet to his dying ears. He came, strange and shy, into a world which knew him only in his books, and to which the gentle and grave demeanor of the shrinking and worn recluse seemed out of keeping with the fearless brain and heart which his career as a thinker proved him to have. The reign had run for forty years when Harriet Martineau was taken from that beautiful and romantic home in the bosom of the lake country to which her celebrity had drawn so many famous visitors for so long a time. The renown of Dickens began with the reign, and his death was sadly premature when he died in his quaint and charming home at Gad's Hill, in the country of Falstaff and Prince Hal, some thirty-three years after. Mrs. Browning passed away very prematurely; but it might well be contended that the fame, or at least the popularity, of Robert Browning belongs to this later part of the reign even though his greatest work belongs to the earlier. The author of the most brilliant and vivid book of travel known in our modern English, “Eothen," made a sudden renown in the earlier part of the reign, and achieved a new and a different sort of repute as the historian of the Crimean war during the later part. Still, if we take the close of the Crimean war as an event dividing the reign thus far into two parts, we shall find that there does seem a tolerably clear division between the literature of the two periods. We have therefore put in this first part of our history the men and women who had distinctly made their mark in these former years, and who would have been famous if from that time out they had done nothing more. It is with this division borne in mind that we describe the reign as more remarkable in the literature of the earlier and in the science of these later years. It is not rash to say that, although poets, historians, and novelists of celebrity came afterward and may come yet, the literature of our time gave its measure, as the French phrase is, in that earlier period.

Alike in its earlier passages and in its later the reign is rich in historical labors. The names of Grote, Macaulay, and Carlyle occur at once to the mind when we survey the former period. Mr. Grote's history of Greece is indeed a monumental piece of work. It has all that patience and exhaustive care which principally mark the German historians, and it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally in the representatives of what Carlyle has called the Dryasdust school. Grote threw himself completely into the life and the politics of Athens. It was