The faintly limned outlines of the nucleus which that name once included, are all gone long ago, dissolved in the splendors, dilated into the infinities which this modern Shakespeare dwells in. It is Shakespeare the author, that we now know only, the author of these worlds of profoundest art—these thought-crowded worlds, which modern reading discovers in these printed plays of his. It is the posthumous Shakespeare of the posthumous volume, that we now know only. No, not even that; it is only the work itself that we now know by that name-the phenomenon and not its beginning. For, with each new study of the printed page, further and further behind it, deeper and deeper into regions where no man so much as undertakes to follow it, retreats the power, which is for us all already, as truly as if we had confessed it to ourselves, the unknown, the unnamed.

What does this old player's name, in fact, stand for with us now? Inwrought not into all our literature merely, but into all the life of our modern time, his unlearned utterances our deepest lore, which "we are toiling all our lives to find," his mystic page, the page where each one sees his own life inscribed, point by point, deepening and deepening with each new experience from the cradle to the grave; what is he to us now? Is he the teacher of our players only? What theatres hold now his school? What actors' names stand now enrolled in its illustrious lists? Do not all our modern works incorporate his lore into their essence, are they not glittering on their surface everywhere, with ever new, unmissed jewels from his mines? Which of our statesmen, our heroes, our divines, our poets, our philosophers, has not learned of him; and in which of all their divergent and multiplying pursuits and experiences do they fail to find him still with them, still before them?

The name which has stood to us from the beginning, for all this—which has been inwrought into it, which concentrates it in its unity-cannot now be touched. It has lost its original significance. It means this, and this only to us. It has drunk in the essence of all this power, and light, and beauty, and identified itself with it. Never, perhaps, can it well mean anything else

to us.

You cannot christen a world anew, though the name that was given to it at the font prove an usurper's. With all that we now know of that heroic scholar. from whose scientific dream the New World was made to emerge at last, in the face of the mockeries of his time, with all that appreciation of his work which the Old World and the New alike bestow upon it, we cannot yet separate the name of his rival from his hard-earned triumph. What name is it that has drunk into its melody, forever, all the music of that hope and promise, which the young continent of Columbus still whispers-in spite of old European evils planted there -still whispers in the troubled earth? Whose name is it that stretches its golden letters, now, from ocean to ocean,. from Arctic to Antarctic, whose name now enrings the millions that are born, and live, and die, knowing no world but the world of that patient scholar's dream-no reality, but the reality of his chimera?

What matters it? "What's in a name?"

Who cares? Is there any voice from that hero's own tomb, to rebuke this wrong? No. He did not toil, and struggle, and suffer, and keep his manly heart from breaking, to the end, that those millions might be called by his name. Ah, little know they, who thus judge of works like his, what roots such growths must spread, what broad, sweet currents they must reach and drink from. If the millions are blessed there, if, through the heat and burden of his weary day, man shall at length attain, though only after many an erring experience and fierce rebuke, in that new world, to some height of learning, to some scientific place of peace and rest, where worlds are in harmony, and men are as one, he will say, in God's name, Amen! For, on the heights of endurance and self renunciation, where the divine is possible with men, we have one name.

What have we to do with this poor peasant's name, then, so hallowed in all our hearts, now, with household memories, that we should seek to tear it from the countless fastenings which time has given it? This name, chosen at least of fortune, if not of nature, for the place it occupies, dignified with all that she can lend it-illustrious with her most lavish favoritism-has she not chosen to encircle it with honors which make

poor those that she saves for her kings and heroes? Let it stand, then, and not by grace of fortune only, but by consent of one who could afford to leave it such a legacy. For he was one whom giving did not impoverish-he had wealth enough of his own and to spare, and honors that he could not part with.

"Once," but in no poet's garb, once, through the thickest of this "workingday world," "he trod" for himself, with bleeding feet," the ways of glory here," "and sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," and, from the wrecks of lost "ambition," found to the last "the way to rise in."

"By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,

The image of his Maker, hope to win by't? Love thyself last: cherish the hearts that hate thee;

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, To silence envious tongues. Be just, and

fear not:

Let all the ends thou aim'st at, be thy country's,

Thy God's, and truth's; then, if thou fall'st, thou fall'st

A noble martyr!"

Let the name stand, then, where the poet has himself left it. If he—if he himself did not scruple to forego his fairest honors, and leave his immortality in a peasant's weed; if he himself could consent to bind his own princely brows in it, though it might be for ages, why e'en let him wear it, then, as his own proudest honor. To all time let the philosophy be preached in it, which found in a name" the heroic height whence its one great tenet could be uttered with such an emphasis, philosophy-"not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute," roaming here at last in worlds of her own shaping; more rich and varied, and more intense than nature's own; where all things "echo the name of Prospero;" where, "beside the groves, the fountains, every region near seems all one mutual cry;" where even young love's own youngest melodies, from moon-lit balconies, warble its argument. Let it stand, then. Leave to it its strange honors-its unbought immortality. Let it stand, at least, till all those who have eaten in their youth of the magic tables spread in it, shall have died in the wilderness. Let it stand while it will, only let its true significance be recognized.

For, the falsity involved in it, as it now stands, has become too gross to be en

dured any further. The common sense cannot any longer receive it, without self-abnegation; and the relations of this question, on all sides, are now too grave and momentous to admit of any further postponement of it.

In judging of this question, we must take into account the fact that, at the time when these works were issued, all those characteristic organizations of the modern ages, for the diffusion of intellectual and moral influences, which now everywhere cross and recross, with electric fibre, the hitherto impassable social barriers, were as yet unimagined. The inventions and institutions, in which these had their origin, were then but beginning their work. To-day, there is no scholastic seclusion so profound that the allied voice and action of this mighty living age may not perpetually penetrate it. To-day, the work-shop has become clairvoyant. The plow and the loom are in magnetic communication with the loftiest social centres. The last results of the most exquisite culture of the world, in all its departments, are within reach of the lowest haunt, where latent genius and refinement await their summons; and there is no "smallest scruple of nature's excellence" that may not be searched out and kindled. The Englishman who but reads The Times, today, puts himself into a connection with his age, and attains thereby a means of enlargement of character and elevation of thought and aims, which, in the age of Elizabeth, was only possible to men occupying the highest official and social position.

It is necessary, too, to remember that the question here is not a question of lyric inspiration, merely; neither is it a question of dramatic genius, merely. Why, even the poor player, that Hamlet quotes so admiringly, "but in a dream of passion," his soul rapt and subdued with images of tenderness and beauty, "tears in his eyes, the color in his cheeks," even he, with his fine sensibilities, his rhythmical ear, with his living conceits, if nature has but done her part towards it, may compose you a lyric that you would bind up with 'Highland Mary," or "Sir Patrick Spens," for immortality. And even this poor tinker, profane and wicked as he is, and coarse and unfurnished for the poet's mission as he seems, when once the infinities of religion, with their

to scorn; undo his illustrious monument to its last Anglo-Saxon stone, and, "by our lady, build-theatres!" If not Juliet only, but her author, and Hamlet's author, too, and Lear's, and Macbeth's can be made without "philosophy," we are for Romeo's verdict, "Hang up philosophy." If such works as these, and Julius Cæsar, and Coriolanus, and Antony, and Henry V., and Henry VIII.-if the Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Merchant of Venice, and the Twelfth Night, if Beatrice, and Benedict, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and Iago, and Othello, and all their immortal company-if these works, and all that we find in them, can be got out of Plutarch's Lives, and Holinshed, and a few old ballads and novels-in the name of all that is honest, give us these, and let us go about our business; and henceforth let him that can be convicted "of traitorously corrrupting the youth of this realm, by erecting a grammar-school," be consigned to his victims for mercy. "Long live Lord Mortimer!" Down with the " papermills!" "Throw learning to the dogs! we'll none of it!"

But we are not, as yet, in a position to estimate the graver bearings of this question. For the reverence which the common theory has hitherto claimed from us, as a well-authenticated historical fact, depending apparently, indeed, on the most unimpeachable external evidence for its support, has operated, as it was intended to operate in the first instance, to prevent all that kind of reading and study of the plays which would have made its gross absurdity apparent. In accordance with this original intention, to this hour it has constituted a barrier to the understanding of their true meaning, which no industry or perseverance could surmount; to this hour it has served to prevent, apparently, so much as a suspicion of their true source, and ultimate intention.

But let this theory, and the pre-judgment it involves, be set aside, even by an hypothesis, only long enough to permit us once to see, for ourselves, what these works do in fact contain, and no amount of historical evidence which can be produced, no art, no argument, will suffice to restore it to its present position. But it is not as a hypothesis, it is not as a theory, that the truth here indicated will be devel

oped hereafter. It will come on other grounds. It will ask no favors.

Condemned to refer the origin of these works to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited, a person of the most ordinary character and aims, compelled to regard them as the result merely of an extraordinary talent for pecuniary speculation in this man, how could we, how could any one dare to see what is really in them? With this theory overhanging them, though we threw our most artistic lights upon it, and kept it out of sight when we could, what painful contradictory mental states, what unacknowledged internal misgivings were yet involved in our best judgments of them. How many passages were we compelled to read “ trippingly," with the mind's eye," as the players were first taught to pronounce them on the tongue; and if, in spite of all our slurring, the inner depths would open to us, if anything, which this theory could not account for, would, notwithstanding, obtrude itself upon us, we endeavored to believe that it must be the reflection of our own better learning, and so, half lying to ourselves, making a wretched compromise with our own mental integrity, we still hurried on.

Condemned to look for the author of Hamlet himself-the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, "the glass of fashion and the mould of form"-in that dirty, doggish group of players, who come into the scene summoned like a pack of hounds to his service, the very tone of his courtesy to them, with its princely condescension, with its arduous familiarity, only serving to make the great, impassable social gulf between them the more evidentcompelled to look in that ignominious group, with its faithful portraiture of the players of that time (taken from the life by one who had had dealings with them), for the princely scholar himself in his author, how could we understand him the enigmatical Hamlet, with the thought of ages in his foregone conclusions?

With such an origin, how could we see the subtlest skill of the university, not in Hamlet and Horatio only, but in the work itself, incorporated in its essence, pervading its execution? With such an origin as this, how was it possible to note, not in this play only, but