he takes no keep. He may have been junior to Shakespeare; he may have died before Shakespeare. Why he, a great courtier, lawyer, and poet, began by buying 'reversions of old plays,' and working them up for a company of actors, who knows? He, a great scholar, puts his hand on an older Troilus and Cressida,' he adds some immortal pearls to that dunghill, but leaves in it the ignorant and odious assaults on Homer's heroes which no scholar can read without pity and regret-a hash made of the mediæval legends and the few translated Books of Homer which Chapman had published (1598). X was no scholar if he thus handled Achilles and Aias and Aristotle-who lived before the Trojan war!

That is the point-the author, whoever he was, was no scholar. He had the small Latin' with which Ben credits him. Into the question of Shakespeare's scholarship I am not going here. If he left a Latin school at thirteen, he left at an age when many boys went to the Universities. If he were not a genius, but a clever boy, he had Latin enough for his purposes; notoriously he always used translations when he could, sometimes with the Latin beside him. As to his other knowledge and accomplishments, if I attribute them to the acquisitive power of genius, I say no more than Shakespeare (or X) thought possible. The Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V' (Act I. scene 1) speaks of the wild Prince turned King :

Never was such a sudden scholar made . . .

Hear him but reason in divinity

You would desire the King were made a prelate,
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
You would say it hath been all in all his study.

Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,' for he had roistered by day and by night with Falstaff and Poins. And never noted him in any study, any retirement, any sequestration From open haunts and popularity.' The Bishop of Ely offers a not very intelligible explanation, and the Archbishop says, 'It must be so, for miracles are ceased'-a most heterodox remark!

Mr. Greenwood, like the Archbishop, says that miracles do not happen.' The miracle of genius, however, was apparently a surprise to the Archbishop in the play, but I am not surprised that Mr. Greenwood finds it much easier to believe in his own strange hypothetical X: the author who hid himself under an actor's name, who neglected his manuscripts, and made Ben

Jonson his editor; the scholar who used cribs to books which he could read with facility and pleasure'; made Aristotle earlier than the siege of Troy; made Homer's heroes ride horses in battle; and supposed the Delphic Oracle to be contemporary with a Bohemia which, in the thirteenth century A.D., really had two sea coasts, as Mr. Greenwood learnedly insists.

The extreme Baconians aver that Shakespeare could not even write, and, as that must have been known to his intimates, the actors, they could not credit him with authorship, as they did. Mr. Greenwood is not so foolish, but he holds Shakespeare to have been a non-reading man; no books are mentioned in his will (nor in the wills of Samuel Daniel, Hooker, and other well-read men). If Shakespeare were notably ignorant, his intimates could not think him the author. Mr. Greenwood says that some would see through it' (it' is the mask-name, William Shakespeare,' adopted by X), and roundly accuse the player of putting forth the works of others as his own.' Of course they would, but we do not gather a hint that they ever did. To such, Mr. Greenwood goes on, he would be Poet-ape' or an upstart crow' beautified with the feathers of other writers (Beeching v. Greenwood, p. 54). This is the old fallacy. Ben never accused Poet-ape of not producing works or of pretending to be the author of other men's works. His foolish taunt was that these works of Poet-ape were a tissue of plagiarised samples of other men's wit; the same railing accusation was constantly brought against Molière.

But we had not yet arrived at Mr. Greenwood's attempt to find a motive for X's conduct when he stooped to vamp up and work over plays for a company of actors. We find the motive explained at last (p. 514). 'Shakespeare' (that is X, the Great Unknown), was, I take it, a busy man, whose aim it was to use the stage as a means to convey instruction to the people' (my italics), and to teach them a certain measure of philosophy through the medium of the theatre.'

The Shakespearean plays read-do they not?-like the hasty work of a busy courtier bent on disseminating popular instruction in philosophy. He is not the man to grudge to the groundlings knowledge of the fact that Aristotle lived before the Trojan war. Bacon behaved differently. When he wrote on philosophy he wrote in Latin. So Bacon, at all events, is not X. Of X no more is known than that he was not Bacon.

ANDREW LANG.

SOMETHING TO BE FORGOTTEN.

GEOFFREY HEYWOOD, Fellow and Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society, had concluded his lecture on The Head Waters of the Orinoco before a crowded audience of fellow-members and their friends and distinguished guests. The usual post-lecture comments were being made, all complimentary, some enthusiastically so, when a small sandy-haired Scotsman got up, and, by a clearing of his throat like the sound of a grandfather's clock about to strike, gave notice of his intention of speaking.

After some preliminary congratulatory remarks, he turned to the chairman:

'But, sir,' he continued, ' there is one point on which I myself, and I think I am speaking for all of us, would like more information. You, sir, have congratulated Mr. Heywood, and with justice, on the remarkable fulness with which he has kept his diary under circumstances the most difficult. And here comes my difficulty. Between June 24 and 26 last is a marked, a very marked, hiatus. In the book we have all read and admired this period is dismissed in a few lines to the effect that Mr. Heywood and his companions were forced to turn back after an encounter with hostile Indians, in the course of which they were fortunate enough to rescue Mr. Arthur Westlake and his daughter. Now every other occurrence of importance has been described with very full detail, and, I submit, an encounter with hostile Indians and the rescue of a missionary and his daughter cannot be catalogued as unimportant. I came here to-night hoping for, and expecting, enlightenment, and I am disappointed. Mr. Heywood has not even referred to those dates. And I for one would like to know more.'

Heywood flushed with vexation. It was not the manner of speech that annoyed him. He had lectured before, and knew that among sundry men of travel little breath is wasted in discursive amenities. He had hoped the point would be overlooked.

'I trust you will not think me discourteous,' he said, rising, but I can give no information beyond that indicated in my book. Those days, indeed, were not uneventful, but the events were of such a character that, with the exception of the providential rescue of

Mr. Westlake and his daughter, my comrades and I have agreed to forget them, if,' he passed his hand wearily across his forehead, 'we only could.' 'Most of us,' raising his voice, in our lives have had an experience we would give much not to have to remembera something to be forgotten.'

The Scotsman hesitated a moment, as if about to reply; then, with a muttered' I'm disappointed,' he resumed his seat.

He was not the only individual disappointed: the feeling was general. There ensued a perceptible chill in the psychical atmosphere; all warmth died away, and the effect was not only immediate but retrospective. To use an expressive slang metaphor, the lecture became a frost."

'My comrades and I have agreed to forget them if we only could!' If we only could! Malcolm Duncan and myselfHeywood's comrades-Westlake and his daughter, we would fain forget.

If we have at length decided to depart from our resolve of silence, I trust it will not be imputed to us for pusillanimity. It is the Scotsman who is to blame. With a pertinacity characteristic of his nation he determined to attain his object: it was nothing less than a petty persecution organised by himself and his colleagues. If we have yielded, or seem to have yielded, let him be assured that we have not been bullied into so doing. Our reluctance was not due to the suggestion-as often insinuated-that the events, or rather the event, of those days was discreditable to us, but that it was incredible, and—a something to be forgotten.

Now judge!

It was

On the morning of June 23 we came to a sudden halt. not that the difficulties of the ground were insuperable, though they were sufficiently severe, but that the Indian porters refused to advance, and neither persuasions nor threats could cajole or force them to move onwards. They were frightened, if ever men were, and it required a determined intervention on our part to prevent a panic retreat.

Since sunrise we had been toiling through thick boulder-strewn underwood, until, all at once, we emerged on a desolate expanse of barren stones, barriered by a precipitous wall of fantastic cliffs, and in a moment all was mutiny.

At first we lost our tempers, but after a while, when 'quiet reigned,' enforced admittedly by a muzzle-end view of three repeating-rifles, saner counsels prevailed and we summoned Jack.'

Jack was our interpreter, but his Indian name was unpronounceable, so we rechristened him.

Jack could no more explain the cause of the trouble than ourselves, so we commissioned him to find out-and quick. When we heard what he had ascertained, we concluded that if any folly as to the question of advance or retreat lay at anyone's door, it was not at that of the porters.

We had, we gathered, followed the wrong fork of the river, and had so come within perilous touch of a singularly formidable tribe. Brave, warlike, and desperately cruel, they had established by force of arms and the terror of their name such a supremacy over the surrounding communities that these all lay under tribute. The tribute took a terrible form, human beings: men or women, sometimes half a score at the time, according to the selection of the savage emissary; they were given up and led away beyond those fantastic heights, to be, according to shuddering report, sacrificed with horrid rites to a Beast-God.

To the latter part of Jack's story we paid little attention. We had heard many strange tales of men and things, but on closer acquaintance had found nothing unexpectedly abnormal. Nevertheless for three Europeans, with no better support than a body of scared porters, to remain within striking distance of a warlike tribe of bloodthirsty savages was obviously suicidal, and a retreat was accordingly sounded.

Throughout the precipitate return-journey Heywood hung in the rear, moodily silent. It was not until supper was over and pipes lighted that he talked.

'I say,' he began, 'I've been thinking' (' I know that,' grunted Duncan). I have more than half a mind to try and pluck the heart of this mystery. What say you? Will you come ?

Duncan groaned.

'I knew it,' he said pathetically. All right. I'm game. I only stipulate we take Jack with us to do the talking in case the devil should prove less black than he's painted. What say you?' to me.

'What does it matter what I say?' I retorted crossly—I had seen as clearly as Duncan what was passing in Heywood's mind. 'I think it sheer rank lunacy, but you know very well if you go, I shall not stay behind. Now you two plan out the details. I'm going to sleep.'

'All right, old chap. good-night' that reached

Wake in a better temper,' was the last me, as I surlily rolled myself up in my