to write without any moral purpose." ... "His plots are often so loosely formed that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design."

"It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labor to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced and imperfectly represented."

And so it may be said that in England, after Shakspere's death, the Drama was devoted to the imitators of ancient models, under the leadership of Ben Jonson, and later, beyond the middle of the seventeenth century, to the imitators of French taste, for the amusement of Charles the Second, "Defender of the Faith," and the correct Nell Gwynn. Under the guidance of such imitators, from Davenant to Cibber, many of Shakspere's plays were reconstructed for the stage, until The Tatler quotes lines from Davenant's mangled version of "Macbeth," and N. Tate, in his edition of "Lear" "revived with alterations, as acted at the Duke's Theatre," refers to the original play as "an old piece with which he had become acquainted through a friend." Davenant and Dryden in 1670 improved "The Tempest"; Davenant corrected the errors of "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado" in 1673; Sedley cut out the immorality from "Antony" in 1677; Shadwell, in the following year, reformed the character of "Timon"; Tate restored "Lear" to his kingdom and Cordelia to life, and even made "Henry VI.," "Richard II.," and "Coriolanus" conform to the rules of dramatic art which Shakspere had so defiantly violated. Durfey corrected the imperfect plot, characterization, and diction of "Cymbeline," and administered just punishment to Iachimo; and finally, Betterton and Cibber, in 1710, added elegance to the wit of Falstaff and refinement to the bloody cunning of Richard.

"All these versions," as Ulrici says, "were essentially the same in character; as a rule, only such passages as were most effective on the stage were left unaltered, but in all cases the editors endeavored to expunge the supposed harshnesses of language and versification; powerful passages were tamed down and diluted, elegant passages embellished, tender passages made more tender; the comic scenes were provided with additional indelicacies, and it was further endeavored to make the aim of the action more correct by the removal of some supposed excrescences, or by the alteration of the scenic arrangement and the course of the action."

Yet, in spite of all these distortions of the great originals, in conformity with the taste of corrupt courts, the love and admiration of the English people for the dramas as Shakspere wrote them was attested by more than twenty complete and critical editions of his works before the end of the eighteenth century; and the high estimate of his genius during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was never questioned until 1904, when Professor Barrett Wendell, in his "Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature," discovered and revealed to the world that Shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by others."

It had taken nearly three centuries of time and the researches of countless scholars to make the discovery, and they had all failed except Professor Wendell. During Shakspere's life and after his death, none of his contemporaries ever accused him of imitating "fashions set by others"; none of them, except the profligate Greene, of "beautifying himself with others' feathers."

Edmund Malone, by what may be called digital criticism, undertook to prove that Shakspere, in the second and third parts of "Henry VI.," stole 1771 lines from the "Contention," originally written by another hand, remodelled 2373 lines, and added 1899 of his own; but even Malone did not charge that Shakspere imitated the author of the "Contention"; his argument, if it had not been conclusively answered again and again, would prove that Shakspere was "the most unblushing plagiarist that ever put pen to paper."

But long before Malone came Lessing, who in 1759 led the successful attack upon the pseudo-classicism of the French dramatists, proved that the three unities were but the articles of an outworn creed, and in 1758, that Shakspere was something more than a successful playwright, more than the successful rival of Marlowe and Kyd and Dekker and Beaumont and Fletcher, more than "the master of the revels to mankind," and led critical opinion to the conclusion that he was the foremost man of his time and of all time, with power to search the secrets of all hearts, to measure the abysses of all passion, to portray the weakness of all human foibles, to create characters who act and speak and are as much alive to us as the men and women we daily meet, to teach mankind the profoundest philosophy, the littleness of the great, the greatness of humility and truth, and to inculcate by immortal examples the highest and purest morality.

And so England found at last the greatness of her greatest son in the "father of German literature," and the nineteenth century affirmed the judgment of Lessing. Among Germans, it needs only to name Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Ulrici, and Gervinus; among Englishmen, Coleridge, who said, "No one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shaksperean idiom"; and Charles Knight, who has exploded the traditions of Rowe and Stevens about the deer stealing, the wife desertion and the testamentary insult, and conclusively shown that "the theory of Shakspere's first employment in repairing the plays of others is altogether untenable, supported only by a very narrow view of the great essentials of a dramatic work, and by verbal criticism which, when carefully examined, fails even in its own petty assumptions."

But English criticism is not conclusive for us without the indorsement of American scholars. Let me quote what Emerson says:—"He is the father of German literature. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shaksperean. His mind is the horizon beyond which we at present do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. He cannot step from his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspiration. He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence, but not into Shakspere's."

And Lowell has uttered what seemed the final estimate:—"Those magnificent crystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses, molten and interfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced by the slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody creation with artifice.... Among the most alien races he is as solidly at home as a mountain seen from many sides by many lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and domesticated in all imaginations."

All this weight of opinion has not served to settle the question of the sovereignty of Shakspere. It is hardly needful to mention the action brought by Ignatius Donnelly to prove that Francis Bacon was the author