Deputy-Speaker 'that the Resolution should be divided into two parts, that the first part should stop at the word "proceed "'— unconscious irony or Irishism there in the last line but one, and that the second part " and that this Resolution be a Standing Order of the House should be put as a separate question.' The first part, he said, dealt with certain alterations which were proposed to be made, and which if carried would have the effect of a Sessional Order. The second part dealt with an alteration of the Standing Orders of the House. He submitted that a single Resolution could not create a Sessional Order and at the same time alter the Standing Orders of the House. That was all rubbish, but the Deputy-Speaker had to rule upon it, although everybody knew that whether he ruled or not, or how he ruled, did not really matter, because the Motion would not be voted on at all. And yet this palaver on short speeches proceeded with due gravity and deliberation, lasting from halfpast eight until, as the book records, it being Eleven of the Clock, the Debate stood adjourned.' It has not been resumed; ambiguous, undecided, never voted on, absurdly abortive, it lasted through eighteen pages and ended in smoke; for fragrant were the cigars lit in the Cloakroom, as down the corridors and stairs resounded our nunc dimittis, Who goes home?'

The humour of it! Charity may smile. Yes, but the unbusiness-like protraction, the mock economy, and the futility too! The tongue was in the cheek all the while. The augurs might sit solemn and the representative of the Government deliver the official view as if the matter had the gravest moment, but an Irish Member cruelly pointed out that the proposer'the hon. Member who was so anxious for few and short speeches during the last Session had spread himself over no less than a hundred and seventy-eight subjects, and took the House into his confidence with regard to his views upon all.' Thus is it that even the boldest reformers among us in this matter unconsciously grow into the habit of wasting the fleeting and irreparable hours. But here is the Library, a haunt of learned peace, a silent nook in a clubhouse of pragmatists; and so here a few of us sit, for hours each night, while an inundation of words that froth rolls through the rest of the House. Sometimes the bubbles of that froth are iridescent; sometimes there is a sparkle in the glass. But oh! how flat and stale the outpour usually, and how one longs to be elsewhere, in bookish cloister or cathedral, safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.'

SHAKESPEARE OR X?

THE idea that Francis Bacon was the author of the plays and poems of William Shakspere, Shakespeare, Shake-speare, or Shaxper (by any other spelling he will smell as sweet), arose sixty years ago, in the distraught brain of a Miss Delia Bacon of America. Like the Darwinian theory, which occurred simultaneously to Mr. Darwin and to Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the 'Baconian' theory also uprushed into the mind, not only of Miss Bacon, but of a Mr. Smith of English birth. For long it was dear only to the quarter-educated, and was supported by their innocent audacity of ignorance, and their discoveries of 'ciphers' in which Bacon not only revealed the secret of his authorship, but displayed an unexpected vein of lunacy. He declared that he was kep' out of his own,' and was rightful king of England! F. Rex' he signs himself in Mrs. Gallup's latest volume of revelations.

6

There is a sane spot in every man's brain,' and in hunting for ciphers the Baconians proved themselves no exceptions to the rule. For, if Bacon were sane, and if he secretly composed the Shakespearean plays, he would assuredly leave behind him (as) Scott did) some vindication of his authorship, so the Baconians do well to look for it. But the new claimant, the somebody else, or X, whom I am to discuss, left no evidence whatever; died and made no sign.

Meanwhile, as I have read in some work of the Baconian sect, the sturdy intelligences of Lord Palmerston, Mr. Bright, Mr. Whittier (the American poet), Mark Twain, and other minute scholars, were sure of one thing-namely, that, whoever wrote the plays and poems, Shakespeare of Stratford did not.

This opinion coincides with the fashionable tendency of the Higher Criticism. Whoever wrote the Epistles of St. Paul, St. Paul did not; whoever composed the Iliad, it was not Homer, nor any other great poet, and so on. Consequently, in obedience to authority, many people have made up their minds that Shakespeare did not write any of the works attributed to him. Some acquiesce in this opinion with reluctance. One, a very good

neighbour and a good bowler,' lately told me that the Shakespeare game was up. 'Why?' I asked. Somebody told me so who had read Mr. Greenwood's book,' he said (meaning 'The Shakespeare Problem Restated,' by G. G. Greenwood, M.P., barrister-at-law). Tell your friend it is all nonsense,' I replied, and read Mr. Greenwood's book for yourself.' My friend brightened up and said I was his comforter, but expressed no intention of reading anybody's book.

There may be many other persons who would be sorry to give up good Will,' yet distrust their own powers of grappling with Mr. Greenwood's portly volume of 523 pages. People dip into such books, are lost, find the same strange arguments constantly reiterated, and are hypnotised into consent. To such souls I sing! But I must first say that Mr. Greenwood is no more a Baconian than Crummles was a Prussian. He is untainted by belief in ciphers and cryptograms. His author has left no claim to authorship. Mr. Greenwood merely cannot believe that a rustic from a dirty town, an actor, a bookless man, wrote the plays and poems attributed by his contemporaries to Shakespeare. Mr. Greenwood attributes them to a busy philanthropist, a transcendent poet, a polished courtier, a master of the law, a nameless being whom I shall style X, for short.

The Stratford man, we are told, could not acquire the author's vast knowledge of things in general; his great reading in the Latin tongue, his polish, his familiarity with terms of law, and be the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. Consequently some other man was.

Now it is perfectly true that from documents of the period we know very little about Shakespeare. Look at Shakespeare, Life and Plays,' by Mr. Saintsbury, in Volume V. of the 'Cambridge History of English Literature' (1910), and compare the long and learned lives of Shakespeare by Halliwell-Phillipps, Sir Sidney Lee, and many others. The Lives' are such stuff as dreams are made of,' though invaluable studies of Elizabethan society and literature. As to facts, we have, says Mr. Saintsbury, ' a skeleton which is itself far from complete, and which, in most points. can only be clothed with the flesh of human and literary interest by the most perilous process of conjecture.' We are not absolutely sure of the identity of Shakespeare's father, nor of his wife's, his name is not (nor is. any other boy's) in a list of pupils at Stratford School. We

seldom know when any of his plays was first produced, or first composed, and in his will he says no more about his books than did the learned and judicious Hooker.

'Almost all the commonly received stuff of his life-story is shreds and patches of tradition, if not positive dream-work.' Some of these legends were inserted by Rowe in the first biography of the poet, nearly a century and a half after his birth.

Mr. Greenwood can struggle against the opinion that, in 1592, Greene, the novelist and dramatist, alluded to Shakespeare as Shake-scene,' the Johannes Factotum,' in his own opinion 'the only Shake-scene in a countrie,' who 'supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.' You are the dramatic authors to whom Greene is writing, and certainly Greene says that this Shake-scene,' in his own conceit, can bombast out blank verses as well as they.

Shake-scene is an author; he is also an actor, for he is attacked in a general assault on the actors, those apes' who are accused of scurvy treatment of their authors. I have not a grain of doubt that Greene was aiming at Shakespeare as author-actor. Even Mr. Greenwood--in his long effort to prove that Shakspere the actor, was one man, and that the unknown genius (call him X) who used William Shakespeare' or 'Shakespeare as a nom de guerre, was another man-admits that the words he supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you,' do seem to have the implication' that the player is holding himself out as a writer also.' They can imply nothing else, but let us suppose that some other actorauthor is the Shake-scene' of Greene! The sceptics, like other sceptics, are easily credulous of improbabilities which it suits. them to believe.

There are a number of allusions to Shakespeare, the poet, in the literature of his time. The sceptics take this line in reply: they urge that the Shakespeare who is a poet is not said explicitly, in many of the allusions, to be Shakspere the actor. Mr. Greenwood even insists that William Shakespeare' was an excellent nom de guerre for a concealed author to assume, at a moment when a William that spelled his name 'Shakspere' was notoriously an actor, and was the only William Shakspere before the public in London.

Now suppose that our age were an age of loose arbitrary spelling of proper names. Would it be wise in a great dramatic

poet, courtier, lawyer, philosopher, anxious to conceal his identity, to sign himself' Cyril Maud,' or 'Charles Windham?' Why should the author-a most retiring person-lead the world to suppose that he was Mr. Cyril Maude, or Sir Charles Wyndham, especially if these were illiterate men manifestly incapable of great poetry? There would be endless trouble and confusion; and if either Mr. Maude or Sir Charles Wyndham were an unlearned rustic, a bookless man (as Mr. Greenwood's Shakspere was), while the plays of the Unknown were full of classical allusions, everyone would see through the clumsy imposture. But there is not a solitary tittle of evidence that, in Shakespeare's time, or till Miss Delia Bacon's, any mortal ever doubted his authorship. Yet the actor went about among men of all degrees; he was no hermit.

When contemporaries of Shakespeare wrote about Shakespeare's plays and poems, they had no reason to add, ́ We mean the plays and poems of Mr. William Shakspere of My Lord of Leicester's servants, or of the King's servants.' There was no other William Shakespeare in the public eye, everyone concerned with the stage and literature knew well who William Shak—any spelling you please-was.

Mr. Greenwood does not seem to understand that an important actor in the greatest dramatic company of the age, one of the King's servants, a groom of the Royal Bedchamber, was a notable figure in the town; and that, as no other William Shakespeare or Shakspere was notable, critics who wrote about William Shakespeare's plays did not need to tell their readers who William Shakespeare was, did not need to say we mean the actor.'

When, now and then, a critic or poet does explicitly mention the actor William as identical with William the poet, Mr. Greenwood tries to explain his evidence away, and fails. Thus the Cambridge wits about 1597-1601 in their comedies, The Pilgrimage to and Return from Parnassus,' in their references to Shakespeare, seem to convey the notion that Shakespeare is the favourite of the rude half-educated strolling players' (and of the ignorant braggart Gullio, who delights in his Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet '), as distinguished from the refined geniuses of the University.' So Mr. Greenwood quotes Mr. Mullinger, and both are right. The University wags do not recognise Shakespeare as a man of much learning'; they leave