There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect such assumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a few separate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the empty space intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as to authorship.  Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I have already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sane men—­most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics—­the gift bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argument and possibility for proof.  He was the very Columbus of mare’s nests; to the discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to an ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction.  On the devoted head of Shakespeare—­who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur—­he would have piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert.  His “School of Shakspere,” though not an academy to be often of necessity perambulated by the most peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain as a monument of critical or uncritical industry, a storehouse of curious if not of precious relics, and a warning for other than fair women—­or fair scholars—­to remember where “it is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets.”

To me the difference appears immeasurable between the reasons for admitting the possibility of Shakespeare’s authorship in the case of Arden of Feversham, and the pretexts for imagining the probability of his partnership in A Warning for Fair Women.  There is a practically infinite distinction between the evidence suggested by verbal or even more than verbal resemblance of detached line to line or selected passage to passage, and the proof supplied by the general harmony and spiritual similarity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a whole with the known works of the hypothetical author.  This proof, at all events, we surely do not get from consideration in this light of the plea put forward in behalf of A Warning for Fair Women.  This proof, I cannot but think, we are very much nearer getting from contemplation under the same light of the claim producible for Arden of Feversham.

A Warning for Fair Women is unquestionably in its way a noticeable and valuable “piece of work,” as Sly might have defined it.  It is perhaps the best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic tragedy—­of realism pure and simple applied to the service of the highest of the arts.  Very rarely does it rise for a very brief interval to the height of tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely.  The epilogue affixed