When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions to his notes made about 1690-1708, we are concerned with evidence much too remote, and, in your own classical style, “all this is just a little mixed.” {201b} With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr. William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt.  I do not habitually believe in what I hear from “the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,”—­no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the Laird,—­the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty in the bloom of girlhood.  Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton’s information), in 1709, about Shakespeare’s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said.  But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left on record.  But this evidence you explain away by aetiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.

What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men’s impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays.  Men also had Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do not wonder at it.  Of the genius of Shakespeare England could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623), not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664.  The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after 1664—­and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless.  What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.

CHAPTER XI:  THE FIRST FOLIO

“The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays.  The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait.  The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere.  Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.