man—­he would appeal to their justly honoured Founder—­require further evidence as to the original of Black Will Shakebag?  Another important character in the play was Black Will’s accomplice and Arden’s servant—­Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been called Murderous Michael.  The single fact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to the mind of every member present, with regard to the original of this personage.  It now only remained for him to produce the name of the real author of this play.  He would do so at once—­Ben Jonson.  About the time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writing those additions to the Spanish Tragedy of which a preposterous attempt had been made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and utterly unlike the style of Jonson.  To dispose for ever of this pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the names of its two first and principal supporters—­Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter).  Now, in these “adycions to Jeronymo” a painter was introduced complaining of the murder of his son.  In the play before them a painter was introduced as an accomplice in the murder of Arden.  It was unnecessary to dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that between the stage employment or the moral character of the one artist and the other.  In either case they were as closely as possible connected with a murder.  There was a painter in the Spanish Tragedy, and there was also a painter in Arden of Feversham.  He need not—­he would not add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that Ben Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy—­whether deserved or undeserved he would not pretend to say—­the names of two poets who afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous Michael Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and importance—­“The lameness of Shakespeare—­was it moral or physical?” He would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and exploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would at once assume that the infirmity in question was physical.  Then arose the question—­In which leg?  He was prepared, on the evidence of an early play, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was the left.  “This shoe is my father,” says Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona; “no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my mother; nay, that cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; it hath the worser sole.”  This passage was not necessary either to the progress of the play or to the development of the character; he believed he was justified in asserting that it