and the whole of the poem, is by some strong man of the Shakespeare breed.1

"I cannot admit that the Act ('Edward III.,' Act IV.) is his. . . . Any one who attributes the stilted nonsense in this play to Shakespeare may safely be written down ass." 2

The difficulties which this method overtakes in its sweep Mr. Furnivall is ready for. Should anybody ask, for instance, how one man should know a thing at one time and be ignorant of it at another, should be eloquent and verbose, deal now in sterling and now in fustian Oh that is all right, cries Mr. Furnivall; you see Shakespeare wrote his plays in periods and his poems in groups! His second period began with "King John," the first having ended with "Richard II" (p. 40). His third began with "Julius Cæsar" (p. 47). His fourth with" Pericles" (p. 87). The groups are two in number (pp. 45 and 46). In the course of these periods and groups William Shakespeare employs, says Mr. Furnivall, no less than twelve metrical styles, viz., the "light ending," "weak ending," verse line" (p. 93), "run-on lines 29 (p. 33), "stopped" and "unstopped" lines (p. 33), “extra syllabic" (p. 97), " central pause" (p. 20), "rhymed lines" (p. 22), "blank verse "(p. 17), "five-measure dialogue" (p. 22), "alternate rhymed verse" (p. 22), not to mention "six and eight," "eight and seven," etc. (which Mr. Furnivall takes for granted anybody can see), as well as five or six prose styles for the lords, ladies, clowns, beggars, etc.

Or, take the "Merry Wives of Windsor," the only Shakespeare comedy in which, instead of 1 Introduction to "Leopold Shakespeare," p. 36. 2 Ibid., p. 101.

France, Spain, Italy or classic lands the scene is laid in England; and which becomes, under the microscope, a local chronicle, packed full of allusions to well-known matters occurring during the twenty-one years between the skeleton quarto of 1602 and the perfected text of 1623. Here we have the names of petty tradesmen, mention of popular song-books and riddle-books, of the discovery of gold in Guinea, the introduction of hackney coaches, of an unpopular parliament, a court ceremonial, of the bear-baitings and other amusements going on at Paris Gardens. These must have been put in by word of mouth as the events themselves occurred. To suppose them carefully memorized, and finally, after the lapse of a generation, inserted in the folio text, is to suppose almost a moral impossibility, certainly a moral absurdity. But see what esthetic criticism tells us of such a play as this, grown by accretion to three times its original bulk as it left the original playwright's pen! Why, we are told that this is a play of William Shakespeare's second period; that he wrote it in 3018 lines, 2703 of which are prose, 227 blank verse, 69 "five measure," 3 "two measure," ,"3"three measure," and 3"six measure"! and much more to the same purport. The author of this system has assured us that his book, which first, so far as I know, laid down his most remarkable rules, is one of the three works extant which "come near to the true treatment and dignity of the subject, and can be put into the hands of students who want to know the mind of Shakespeare." But, exclaims Mr. Halliwell-Phil

1 Mr. Furnivall's Introduction to Gervinus's Commentaries, p. xxi. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877.

lipps (to whom, after a lifetime of Shakespearean research, this new heraldry must have come with the flavor of a "fad"), could William Shakespeare, when selecting a plot, have given no heed to the wishes of the managers or the inclinations of the public taste? What would Heminges and Condell have said if, on applying to Shakespeare for a comedy, they had been told by the dramatist that he could not comply with their wishes, he being then in his tragic period? That William Shakespeare became one of the richest of Elizabeth's private subjects out of the takings at his playhouses seems, after all, to be the only answer necessary to our esthetic word-counter.

It seems incredible that the New Shakespeare Society should be willing to leave the reasonable doubts and difficulties as to a Shakespearean authorship which for the last twenty-seven years have been growing more and more emphatic-to mumble and roar about their ears, and solace and coddle themselves with little purrings of mutual confidence; to rest the whole pro-Shakespearean case, that is to say, on mere expressions of personal whim or taste, and to meet all the historical and documentary considerations by simply looking in another direction. But there appears to be no escape from the conclusion that they prefer to do just that; to wit (I quote from my friend Mr. Rolfe's introduction to his " Pericles"):

"In the discussion which followed the reading of Mr. Fleay's paper on 'Pericles' before the New Shakespeare Society, May 8, 1874, Mr. Furnivall remarked: 'I hope the fact I am going to mention will render all further discussion as to the Shakespeare part of the "Pericles" unnecessary.

When I first saw Mr. Tennyson . . . he asked me whether I had ever examined "Pericles." I had to confess that I'd never read it, as some friends whom I considered good judges had told me it was very doubtful whether Shakespeare wrote any of it. Mr. Tennyson answered: "Oh! that won't do. He wrote all the part relating to the birth and recovery of Marina and the recovery of Thaisa. I settled that long ago. Come upstairs and I'll read it to you." Upstairs we went, and there I had the rare treat of hearing the poet read, in his deep voice, with an occasional triumphant "Isn't that Shakespeare?" 'What do you think of that?" and a few comments, the genuine part of "Pericles." I need not tell you how I enjoyed the reading, or how quick and sincere my conviction of the genuineness of the part read was. The parts read by Tennyson were almost exactly the same that Mr. Fleay has marked as Shakespeare's; and' Mr. Furnivall adds, 'the independent confirmation of the poet-critic's result by the metrical test-worker's process is most satisfactory and interesting.""

Now, it must have been a rare privilege indeed to hear the laureate read his favorite passages. That they were the finest passages in the play the testimony of Lord (then Mr.) Tennyson ought to satisfy us; and it is gratifying to know, too, that Mr. Furnivall and Mr. Fleay both agreed with Mr. Tennyson that those passages were "Shakespeare" (that is, what every man means by that phrase viz., whatever is matchless and sublime in literature). But if evidence, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, of anything, this story about Lord Tennyson is evidence of what anybody reading Mr. Furnivall's and Mr. Fleay's writings can seeviz., that the quantitative-analysis process of the metrical enumerators invariably gives all the great noble and admirable parts-not to the abstraction we call Shakespeare, but to the identical, his

torical man of that name. In other words, the New Shakespeare Society leave the question just exactly where they find it. After circumambulating their circle they assert that the eloquent passages are Shakespeare's (which is precisely what the world believed before these gentlemen were born), and that if William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write them they can't imagine who did. But while nobody, of course, will disagree with Lord Tennyson that the parts he read are the finest in "Pericles," is the fact of his admiration of certain parts of that play to pass as evidence unimpeachable that the manager of the Globe Theater wrote those parts, and employed outside aid to write all the clowns' and prostitutes' parts, all the badinage and sparkle of wit, all the double-entendre and small-talk of some thirty or forty more, while he, William Shakespeare, only walked in the stately buskin of tragedy himself? I am sure I don't wish to be disrespectful to the New Shakespeare Society, but it seems to me that all their mighty discovery as to stopped and unstopped lines amounts to is that there is no arbitrary rule as to structural forms of tragic and comic poetry, pathos and doggerel-merely this and nothing more! The New Shakespeare Society were certainly not the first discoverers of the fact that the world uses the term Shakespeare as a synonym for what is most sublime and eloquent in literature, and not as the name of any particular rhetorical form.

Again, if there are words in the English language strong enough to assert, and demonstration from internal evidence delicate enough to prove, that many hands and many brains were con