Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by persons of different mental conditions. For example, in 1635 or 1636, Cuthbert Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous actor, Will’s comrade, petitioned Lord Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, for consideration in a quarrel about certain theatres. Telling the history of the houses, he mentions that the Burbages “to ourselves joined those deserving men, Shakspere, Heminge, Condell, Phillips and others.” Cuthbert is arguing his case solely from the point of the original owners or lease-holders of the houses, and of the well-known actors to whom they joined themselves. Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood think that “it does indeed seem strange . . . that the proprietor[s] of the playhouses which had been made famous by the production of the Shakespearean plays, should, in 1635—twelve years after the publication of the great Folio—describe their reputed author to the survivor of the Incomparable Pair, as merely a ‘man-player’ and ‘a deserving man.’” Why did he not remind the Lord Chamberlain that this “deserving man” was the author of all these famous dramas? Was it because he was aware that the Earl of Pembroke “knew better than that”? {0h} These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof positive of their case. Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of what the Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated, in 1623, to him and his brother, by Will’s friends, Heminge and Condell, as they had been patrons of the late William Shakspere and admirers of his plays. The terms of this dedication are to be cited in the text, later. _We_ all _now_ would have reminded the Earl of what he very well knew. Cuthbert did not. The intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will read pp. 481–484 in _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton. Cuthbert was a puzzle-pated old boy. The silence as to Will’s authorship on the part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635–36, cannot outweigh the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed by his friends and fellow-actors in 1623. Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for the affirmative to negative evidence from silence, the silence of Cuthbert Burbage. One may read through Mr. Greenwood’s three books and note the engaging varieties of his views; they vary as suits his argument; but he is unaware of it, or can justify his varyings. Thus, in 1610, one John Davies wrote rhymes in which he speaks of “our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare”; “good Will.” In his period patriotic English critics called a comic dramatist “the English Terence,” or “the English Plautus,” precisely as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant “the American Wordsworth,” or Cooper “the American Scott”; and as Scots called the Rev. Mr. Thomson “the Scottish Turner.” Somewhere, I believe, exists “the Belgian Shakespeare.”