thrust out in all directions, which belong to the creative brain and keep it in tremulous and restless activity, are quite enough so to differentiate the possessor of these endowments from his fellow mortals as to make comparison impossible.  Shakespeare the actor was by the common consent of his enemies one of the deftest fellows that ever made use of other men’s materials—­’Convey, the wise it call.’  I will again quote Spedding: 

’If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education.  Given the faculties, you will find that all the acquired knowledge, art, and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation and had nothing else to do.’

I greatly prefer this cool judgment of a scholar deeply read in Elizabethan lore to Lord Penzance’s heated and almost breathless admiration for the ‘teeming erudition’ of the plays.

Lord Penzance likewise displays a very creditable non-acquaintance with the disposition of authors one to another.  He is quite shocked at the callousness of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to Shakespeare if he were indeed the author of the Quartos which bore his name in his lifetime.  But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it is hard to see how his contemporaries can be acquitted of indifference to his prodigious superiority over themselves.  Authors, however, never take this view.  Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought him a mighty clever fellow and no more.  Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded.  Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the fame of both Tennyson and Browning.  Great living lawyers and doctors do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big way.  The poets and learned critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—­Dryden, Pope, Johnson—­looked upon Shakespeare with an indulgent eye, as a great but irregular genius, after much the same fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson’s day regard the hero of Trafalgar.  ‘Do not criticise him too harshly,’ said Lord St. Vincent; ‘there can only be one Nelson.’

These are not the real difficulties, though they seem to have pressed somewhat heavily on Lord Penzance.

The circumstances attendant upon the publication of the Folio of 1623 are undoubtedly puzzling.  Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind him more than forty plays circulating in London and more or less associated with his name.  His will, a most elaborate document, does not contain a single reference to his literary life or labours.  Seven years after his death the Folio appears, which contains twenty-six plays