It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses, the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays, which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author. These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled on Molière in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print. So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to prove that those who take this view are wrong--and if the word evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence. [SN: _Order of his work._]