It is not, then--it is very far from being--because we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great works ascribed to him. It is because we know so much. No sooner did men open their histories, turn up the records and explore the traditions and trace the gossip of' the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in the face. Long before any "Baconian theory" arose to account for these anomalies: at the instant these plays began to be valued for any thing else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "To be told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 'Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam. * * "I laud," says Hallam, "the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter, and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not sure that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they had left him undisturbed in his obscurity.... If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to know something." "Every accession of in {154}formation we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the poet," cries Mr. William Henry Smith. * "I am one of the many," testifies Mr. Furness, "who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space of each other; are there any other two things in the world more incongruous?" ** * "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886. ** In a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third edition, of the latter's "Authorship of Shakespeare."