A good example is this:  Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of scientific lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were much on a level.  Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts staggered him, as a “Stratfordian.”  A friend told me that he too was equally moved.  I replied that these pseudoscientific “facts” had long been commonplaces.  Pliny was a rich source of them.  Professor Dowden took the matter up, with full knowledge, {93a} and reconverted Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote:  “I am not versed in the literature of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet.  Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so.” {93b}

Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers’s papers on “The Mechanism of Genius” (in his Human Personality), and to consider the humble problem of “Calculating Boys,” which is touched on also by Cardinal Newman.  How do they, at the age of innocence, arrive at their amazing results?  How did the child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid, work out the Euclidean propositions of “bars and rounds,” as he called lines and circles?  Science has no solution!

Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of human nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners and matter of war) Jeanne d’Arc;—­and science, I fancy, is much to seek for a reply.

Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns.  The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much to Mr. Greenwood’s advantage as he supposes.  The genius of Burns, of course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author of the Shakespearean plays.  But that author and Burns have this in common with each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work arises from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier artists.  Burns almost always has a key-note already touched, as confessedly in the poems of his predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or artistic, and so forth.  He “alchemised” his materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of his author of the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into marble.  Notoriously much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.

The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek; in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French; and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry’s Wallace; Locke’s Essay; The Spectator, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots poets of his century, with a world of old Scots songs.  These things, and such as these, were Burns’s given literary materials.  He used them in the only way open to him, in poems written for a rural audience, and