“Witty above her sex, but that’s not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in _that_, but _this_ Wholly of Him with whom she’s now in bliss.” {187d} Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death he was still thought “witty” in Stratford. But what could Stratford know? Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among “the friends of the Muses” in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule. I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he “died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might _move his bones_? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!” {188a} And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon his lips? About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost after Shakespeare’s death, W. Hall, a Queen’s man, Oxford (the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare’s signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen’s. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled, “they would load a great number of waggons.” Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and sextons, “for the most part a very ignorant sort of people.” If Shakespeare _did_, that accommodation of himself to his audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. {189a} Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians. Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter. Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio “a good send-off.” The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor. If so, he may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart’s embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.