can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish.  That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works.  For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly’s Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the houses of the great.  As to untaught nobility of manners, there came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her:  of her manners and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant evidence.  Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d’Arc.

“Ne me dites jamais cette bete de mot, impossible,” said Napoleon:  it is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.

If intellectual “miracles” were impossible to genius, even Bacon could not have been and done all that he was and did, and also the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not have been the scholar that he was.  For the rest, I need not return on my tracks and explain once more such shallow mysteries as the “Silence of Philip Henslowe,” and the lack of literary anecdotage about Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town.  Had Will, not Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough of the kind desired.

“We have the epics of Homer,” people say, “what matters it whether they be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business through seven centuries?  We have the plays of Shakespeare, what matters it whether he, or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?”

It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries, such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give love and praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Achaean “Father of the rest”; and to “friendly Shakespeare.”

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I:  “TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”

To myself Troilus and Cressida is, with Henry vi, Part I, the most mysterious among the Shakespearean plays.  Here we find, if Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient world; but the English author’s eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy.  The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before our era, when, by the author of the Cypria, these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as scoundrels, assassins, and cowards.

In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer is no scholar.  He makes the Achaean fleet muster in “the port of Athens,” of all places.  Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-place, Aulis, in Boeotia. (This Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.) Six gates hath the Englishman’s Troy, and the Scaean is not one of them.