One trouble with much Shakespearean scholarship lies in the assumption that everything that left Shakespeare's hand must have been perfect. Why, he probably used words carelessly and did all kinds of tricks with them, as other geniuses do. Why should we assume that he always wrote a good line? Some of his lines are bad, and it is not necessary for Dr. Pumpernickell to knock out a couple of words or add a couple just to make a line go metrically. These scholars have a split vision. In one note they treat Shakespeare like a god who could not go wrong. In the next note they treat him like a sophomore versifier whose lines have to be corrected. Dr. Furness says that the earliest known text of "Julius Caesar"--that of the First Folio, "is markedly free from corruptions." What corruptions? The printers' or Shakespeare's? Dr. Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a playhouse copy. "Our only recourse is to accept the explanation given by Resch, viz., that these words between Brutus and Messala are an interpolation from a MS. addition which appeared first in a playhouse copy, and which, by mistake, became incorporated in the text." Now, is not that a "soft, downy, pink-cheeked peach of an idea" (Jonson's "Sejanus," act IV., sc. 13, I, 23. Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 1913)? Resch be hanged! What playhouse copy? When? Whose mistake? How incorporated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page are devoted to explaining a difficulty which does not exist. This is the true history of the passage in question. Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of Stratford got roaring full. He went home on foot to Stratford, a long journey, and found Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom was the poet Davenant. This was very disturbing to Will. He did not know until after his death which twin was Davenant. He was then in that fateful year, 1599-1600, writing his play, "Julius Caesar", and making extensive use of Suetonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. Furness thinks this doubtful, but if you are going to guess, why not guess good and plenty?). Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad morning head. That is why he made that slightly confused passage, which has bothered the scholars ever since. The following example of how Shakespeare's biography is written is not a parody. It appears in the New York _Nation_ of November 27, 1913, page 513, in a review of Arthur S. Pier's "Story of Harvard."