New day-new year-in one Put all thy glories on Before thy face earth's troubles haste away. V. Ring out, ye bells of morn, Drive hence old woes forlorn, And in our hearts revive all kindly cheer; Let man his brother greet In castle, hall, and street, And from our lives put hence dark thoughts of fear! Ah, woe unto the heart VI. Where Love shall find no part, That clasps its doors upon the larger life; There Passion holdeth sway Where Love should dwell alway Nor throbs responsive but to chords of strife. VII. Let hand clasp hand again, Forgetful of old pain, And lips meet lips that have been strangers long; Merge all of fair and good In human brotherhood, So shall our hearts join in one endless song. VIII. Awake, glad year, awake! For, though the Future take His meed of sorrow from our earthly days, Yet Love is ever king— Summer shall follow Spring— Then let glad voices raise the chant of praise ! IN 1609, when the existing edition of Troilus and Cressida was printed, the unknown editor, whoever he was, said of Shakespeare, "And believe this, that when he is gone, and his comedies are out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition." Well! Shakespeare's comedies are not yet out of sale, and we do scramble for them and we set up a new English Inquisition" into his writings, his life, his alleged biographies, the vast apocrypha which has accumulated and which is ever accumulating, about his memory, his imputed follies, wickednesses, and crimes, his low and degrading obscenities as, to use Gifford's charitable words, reiterated in Lardner's Cyclopædia by Bell, “The Coryphoeus of Profanation," his piety, his religion, as the Christ in Shakespeare, to take the profane title of a nominally religious book, after the up-to-date manner of Mr. Stead, and all the other follies of a degrading age, which values no wine made of grape, no beer made of malt, but requires everything to be adulterated, spiced, and sensational. Two biographies of the Poet have appeared during the past year which I am about to bring within the purview of our English Inquisition, and as a preface I may say, that neither of them are of a kind to merit the somewhat saturnine animadversions with which I have started. They are in their respective manners, actual biographies, not tissues of errors, of mad conjectures, of malicious and groundless assumptions, and wild hypotheses, like many other modern works professing the same design.* Mr. Lee's is a compressed, and in the main, a faithful digest of modern knowledge of the mighty Poet, published as Canon Ainger wittily suggested, with the prohibition, “No flowers, by request," by no means faultless, as it will be my business to point out, but lucid, pains-taking, penetrative, judicious though not judicial. Still appreciative on the whole, the most compendious, and in the main most accurate life that any man in the present state of our knowledge could have perhaps safely compiled. It is, however, only a compilation. Professor Brandes' work, is in part conjectural, in no sense a compilation, and is called a critical study," which it is in both aspects in which that phrase may be employed as being the author's criticisms, and as being also on tentative ground. In truth, it is a series of essays on the various plays, and on divers surrounding circumstances of the Poet's life near and remote, some of them very remote, others by far too remote, a few beyond the point of remoteness, being merely fanciful, illusionary or visionary, reminding me much of an analysis I heard once placed before a learned judge by counsel in reference to the dates in a complex law case. My Lud," said the advocate, “I will first give you the material dates, next, the dates which may possibly become material, and lastly, the dates which never can " * I refer especially to The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon," Thorpe; and "The Life and Works of Shakespeare," and "A Chronicle History" by Frederick Gard Fleay, 1886. become material." The judge graciously waived reference to these, and I shall ask you on the present occasion to follow his example, and not trouble yourself about some of Professor Brandes' attributed and hypothetic facts, which fall under the last recited category. On the whole, the learned Doctor's book professing only to be a life study, is, as the author himself has declared, in intention and scope a biography-a constructive biography. He has emphatically declared his purpose in the conclusion of his luminous, and must I add ?—voluminous work. "It is to refute this idea of Shakespeare's impersonality, or what Swinburne has called his intangibility, that the present attempt has been made."† And then he proceeds to show how he has built up his life and from what sources. The Poet has incorporated his whole individuality of his writings, and there, if we can read aright, we shall find it."§ With this statement I most cordially concur. But it depends with what acumen we look. I conceive it to be the only biographic method having regard to prior experience, upon which we can now wisely proceed with discretion. ON THE PREVIOUS BIOGRAPHERS OF SHAKESPEARE. Since Rowe, in 1709, published his meagre but careful and fairly accurate memorial of the Poet's life,* all so called biographies, have been nominally constructive, in fact destructive. Professing devotion, they pursued defamation. Credulous, imaginative, evil-thinking, vicious, often mischievous, frequently ignorant, invariably untrue. Let me offer you a few examples. One noble creature, thank Heaven, not an Englishman, says "He (Shakes G +Vol. II, p. 413. § Viz., according to the critical commentator, 45 different works. peare) was not averse to the bottle, or to pursuits still more It may be said, that Theobald, Farmer, Steevens, Thorpe "The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon," p. 21, |