What does it matter whether the immortal works were written by Shakspeare (of Stratford) or by a great and learned man who assumed the name Shakespeare to "Shake a lance at Ignorance"? We should not forget that this phrase "Shake a lance at Ignorance" is contemporary, appearing in Ben Jonson's panegyric in the Shakespeare folio of 1623. CHAPTER II. The Shackspere Monument, Bust, and Portrait. In the year 1909 Mr. George Hookham in the January number of the _National Review_ sums up practically all that is really known of the life of William Shakspeare of Stratford as follows:-- 'We only know that he was born at Stratford, of illiterate parents-- (we do _not_ know that he went to school there)--that, when 18-1/2 years old, he married Anne Hathaway (who was eight years his senior, and who bore him a child six months after marriage); that he had in all three children by her (whom with their mother he left, and went to London, having apparently done his best to desert her before marriage);--that in London he became an actor with an interest in a theatre, and was reputed to be the writer of plays;--that he purchased property in Stratford, to which town he returned;--engaged in purchases and sales and law-suits (of no biographical interest except as indicating his money-making and litigious temperament); helped his father in an application for coat armour (to be obtained by false pretences); promoted the enclosure of common lands at Stratford (after being guaranteed against personal loss); made his will--and died at the age of 52, without a book in his possession, and leaving nothing to his wife but his second best bed, and this by an afterthought. No record of friendship with anyone more cultured than his fellow actors. No letter,--only two contemporary reports of his conversation, one with regard to the commons enclosure as above, and the other in circumstances not to be recited unnecessarily. In a word we know his parentage, birth, marriage, fatherhood, occupation, his wealth and his chief ambition, his will and his death, and absolutely nothing else; his death being received with unbroken and ominous silence by the literary world, not even Ben Jonson who seven years later glorified the plays _in excelsis_, expending so much as a quatrain on his memory.' [Illustration: Plate III. The Stratford Monument, From Dugdale's Warwickshire, 1656.] [Illustration: Plate IV. The Stratford Monument as it appears at the present time.]