The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to proof,—­and with what result?  Beside some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to property, of the poet.  It appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars’ Theatre:  its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his:  that he bought an estate in his native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he was a veritable farmer.  About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the Borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in all respects appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess.  He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers.  I admit the importance of this information.  It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us.  We are very clumsy writers of history.  We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well.  It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.  Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil.  The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont have vainly assisted.  Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.  The genius knows them not.  The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.  I remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet’s question to the ghost:—­

                             “What may this mean,
     That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
     Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”