the language in consequence.) Nothing is more evident, therefore, than that these unread Sonnets were kept alive in their Elizabethan days, as thereafter, simply by the popularity of Shakespeare's name - much as the mere rumor of that name attached to a bit of anonymous doggerel has kept his bones alike from inspection of the curious and the canonization of worshipers.

Now, William Shakespeare, loved and loving gentleman as he was, is understood to have been very shrewd in money matters. None knew the meaning of poverty better than he. Had he not been so, and rightly so, his father would never have stirred outside the door; the Lambert mortgages would have remained unpaid; nor would the Quineys have swarmed around for their kinsman's crumbs, and nudged each other to look up good things where he could place the wealth they saw him hoarding. Is it not, therefore, impossible to suppose him ignorant of or indifferent to the cash value of his own name? Is it not quite as impossible, again, to believe that, if printed at his own instance, he allowed his publisher to dedicate a book to one of his (the publisher's) friends; that if dedicated to either of his own patrons, Pembroke or Southampton, he (Shakespeare) was unable to write his own dedication; or, writing it, asked his publisher to sign it? If the escape from these difficulties is not by way of assumption that Shakespeare sold the use of his name to the printers of anonymous poetry precisely as he appears to have sold it to the printers of anonymous plays, then those difficulties are hopeless indeed! The plays, on the ground of

stage-right or of copyright, might be Shakespeare's, even if not composed by him. But the Sonnets, if his, he must either have written or not written. He could not have done both.

To recapitulate. Either these "Sonnets" are those mentioned as circulating among Shakespeare's private friends prior to 1598, or they are not. If they are, they are as doubtfully his as is the rest of the list of literary matter given by Meres, so far as we know. If they are not, then they have no claim to be called Shakespeare's except from the fact that his name was put on the title-pages of three books of verses among which verses they appeared, at one time only four of them, at another more of them, and at another less; and the value of title-page evidence as to the authorship of Tudor literature we are able to very adequately estimate. In the one case Meres, not reading the literary matter he eulogizes as "sugred," supposed it to consist of "Sonnets"; and so to the support of the Shakespearean authorship has only hearsay testimony to offer. But, inadmissible as this sort of evidence is anyway, what becomes of it when Mr. Massey and Mr. Brown dispose of what little probability of the Shakespearean authorship is left over from Meres, by testifying that Shakespeare's Sonnets have nothing to do with Shakespeare, but are a record of Southampton's private amours! And, in either case, even a Shakespeare must base his claim to literary matter on something stronger than a legend on a title-page.

Nobody can refuse to William Shakespeare personal love, admiration, and gratitude. But what

he never claimed let us not supply to him. The tendency to enlarge the attributes of those we worship is as laudable as is the effort of a good judge according to Littleton - to amplify his jurisdiction. But the tendency may be produced, not only to absurdity, but to disastrous moral ruin. The boy Ireland was disgraced by making what was only legitimate literary parody over into a hateful lie. And what sadder sight has this generation seen than John Payne Collier, a scholar who for fifty years enriched English archæology and letters, dying in almost unnoticed obscurity, shipwrecked by a temptation to discover what was undiscoverable?

A late writer on the legalisms of Shakespeare takes for his legend Hamlet's question, "Why should not this be the skull of a lawyer?" It seems by no means sure that there is any skull at all in that grave under the chancel in Stratford Church. There is no name on the slab that covers it. The mural tablet says distinctly that the remains of William Shakespeare lie "within this monument"; and the grave of Mrs. Shakespeare and her husband are not pointed out as one and the same, though we are told that she did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with the body of her departed liege. It seems the world is never to know what is in that grave. For the Shakespeareans are still scared from opening it to see, by a witch's curse three hundred years old (albeit it is only against "moving," and says nothing about looking at certain bones); and, if anybody but a Shakespearean attempts to touch things, the Stratford beadle proposes to pitch him into the Avon forthwith.

Surely no man lived who more reverenced Shakespeare and all that sounded of him than the lamented Dr. Ingleby. Himself a life trustee of the tomb at Stratford, he urgently demanded that the tomb be opened and its contents reverently perpetuated, instead of being allowed to suffer entire disappearance and obliteration by the processes of time. He prepared a careful volume to show that other poets-lesser men had been so honored by loving countrymen, who even after death continued them in grateful worship. Why should not we honor William Shakespeare by opening his grave and enlisting all the resources of science to preserve whatever mortal is still to be found therein where every passing day leaves less and less to venerate? How much longer is this pious and patriotic duty to be delayed? While we are making our speeches about Shakespeare, organizing societies and pageants, and writing books about him, we permit his actual bones to rot ignobly, because-because some cobbler, by an oversight of his betters, managed to scratch a witch's palindrome upon the stone that was to cover them! It is ridiculous. How, seriously, can nineteenth-century England suppose her neglect of her so great son justified by a piece of anonymous doggerel? It is some time since Englishmen wore dried bats' eyes for charms and shivered over incantations. Besides, it is always a coup d'esprit to outwit a wizard's curse. Dr. Ingleby and Lord Roland Gower have both shown how easy it would be to dodge this one by merely changing the gender or number of the "frend" who was to "move" the bones. Even, therefore, if it had ever been proposed to "move" the bones from the

custody of Trinity, or from Stratford (which it certainly never has been), that rubbish has survived its jurisdiction.

But there is another view to be considered, and one which, as a proposition of law, I believe to be unassailable. There nowhere exists a right to demand that succeeding generations shall respect any one man's place of sepulture. As against one's contemporaries and the vicinage, indeed, a dead man's representatives may resist encroachment upon the earth where his ashes lie. But as against posterity- never; otherwise civilization must find itself brought to a limit, for all earth is a graveyard, nor can we tread except upon what has once been human mold. To be sure, the exact conditions have not yet arrived here, since Shakespeare's grave is still under a consecrated roof. But some day even Stratford's Trinity will crumble, and what was once Shakespeare be desecrated. Even, therefore, at the risk of its being called desecration, is it not better for this generation- – to whom Shakespeare is so much and means so muchto disturb that tomb, rather than that another generation (who may know and love less, or not at all) should trouble it?

It seems to me a peerless and paramount duty, rather than a privilege or a license, to open, repair, and restore the Shakespearean sepulcher. Probably not even a Stratford vestryman- certainly no one of the national trustees of the birthplace

will claim that after two hundred and seventy years of utter neglect no repairs or restorations are needed. Perhaps the Stratford vestryman is chary of restoring the tomb, from experience of sundry