of his own methods of "restoring" the noble pile of Trinity (which remind something of Timur Beg's method of restoring the East, or of Herod's restoration of infants), and, if so, he should be thanked for keeping hands off. But the world has a share in that tomb under the roof of Trinity, and could doubtless find archæologists at once tender and expert for the task! But, supposing the mortal remains of William Shakespeare to lie in that grave, who and what was he when living? It is demonstrated that he was no attorney's clerk, as Lord Campbell believed, but a ripe, learned, and profound lawyer; so saturated with precedents that at once in his sublimest and sweetest flights he colors everything with legal dyes, sounding every depth and shoal of poetry in only the juridicial key. And, moreover, he was a constitutional aristocrat, who believed in the established order of things, and wasted not a word of all his splendid eulogy upon any human right not in his day already guaranteed by charters or by thrones. But while the rolls at Westminster and the Inns of Court contain no allusion to William Shakespeare the barrister, the records of the British stage show that, just at the time the text makes him out the lawyer, he is managing two great theaters in London. Other documents exhibit him as a large speculator in real estate, enjoying an income of $25,000 per annum, at about the date when Messrs. Massey and Brown believe him to have been a poet scribbling sonnets to Lord Southampton, sonnets which, on perusal, turn out to be not sonnets, but together a sort of rhymed diary of Southampton's own private love affairs (at least they coincide with those affairs by a little squeezing, according to Massey, Brown, and others). Add to all these that William Shakespeare was at once a butcher's apprentice and a student of the Stratford grammar-school; that the curriculum at that grammar-school consisted entirely of a venerable birch-rod, Lily's Latin paradigms, the "Criss-Cross Row," and the Church catechism; that the graduate of this grammarschool (for if, as the Baconians allege, he did not attend that temple of learning, it is an eternal verity that he went to no other educational institution) wrote the "Venus and Adonis" as the very first "heir of his invention," etc., etc.; and no wonder our brains reel when we try to ask ourselves, Who was this immortal, anyhow, and who wrote the divine page called his? Was this the William Shakespeare who in silence repeatedly allowed his own name to be credited with the works of other men, and who encouraged the attributing of whatever was splendid or successful in literature to himself? A man who in these days could permit himself to become beneficiary of so fraudulent a transaction as was the "Passionate Pilgrim" affair of 1609, could not have long survived the moral effect of his act. Was the Tudor sense more callous? But, whatever the name, and whoever the author -plays, poems, sonnets, we have them all!-all bound in one mighty book, that age cannot wither nor custom stale; perennial in our hearts and households forever. If a word is better than the truth; if the name "William Shakespeare" is of more value than historical identification of the magnificent and matchless literature which the world worships as Shakespearean; if- as pipes a bard of recent gush — "Though modern science claims, 'tis very plain, We feel them in our hearts—and feeling knows then by all means let traditionists hug the name! But be the substance ours the Book! 1 William Leighton. "Shakespeareana,” vol. i. p. 1. IV “Something Touching The Lord Hamlet” HE acting conceptions of Hamlet have been almost as numerous as the tragedians who have personated him. Burbage, the great Hamlet of Shakespeare's own day, is said to have required from the dramatist's hand the queen's description of the prince as "fat and scant of breath." Betterton, of course, omitted it, being (as indeed were Garrick, Kean, and as is Edwin Booth) small of stature and of meager build. Betterton also omitted the passage commencing 'Angels and ministers of grace, defend us," while Garrick discarded the entire graveyard scene of the fifth act, and took such other liberties as became a true inheritor of the traditions of Dryden and Davenant, who worked over the great text quite at pleasure, turning Macbeth's witches into a ballet, giving Miranda a brother, and making Shylock a low comedian with a red nose, or Portia a soubrette, with imitations of leading local barristers, as happened to hit the ribald tone of their day. But while the actor may not be asked to overlook exigencies of taste and audience, or managers to maintain a purity of context at the expense of empty houses and bankruptcy, editors, commentators, and critics cannot be permitted an equal license of interpretation. These may, indeed, put their multitudinous knowledge into foot-notes; but between the foot-notes and the text a broad line is to be drawn, below which is their prerogative, but above which they can only read like the rest of us. And yet when Ophelia exclaims, "Oh! what a noble mind is here o'erthrown," she appears to have given the keynote to about two centuries of commentary. Doubtless to that gentle lady so did appear the princely lover, who chided her in brusque speech, and with rough denials dismissed her from his presence. But I cannot help thinking that the exegesis which credits Hamlet the Dane (as we have him in the First Folio) with madness, indecision, a disjointed and palsied will, or other insignia of a mind diseased, is drawn not so much from a desire to corroborate Ophelia as from a certain finical overstudy of the crude "Hamblett" of Belleforest, or that earlier Saga of a rude and formative literature, the "Amleth" of Saxo Grammaticus; if, indeed, it be anything else than a supercilious and redundant sapiency and show of profundity in the commentator himself. That our average Shakespearean commen |