It was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean authorship, either that William Shakespeare should be historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student of deep insight into nature and morals--a poet, philosopher, and all the rest--or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the myriad-minded genius required. In other words, it was only necessary to so cloud over _the facts_ as to make the "Shakespearean miracle" to be, _not_ that William Shakespeare had written the works, but--that history should be so silent concerning a "Shakespeare!" So long as the Shakespeareans could cry, "Behold a mys{155}terious dispensation of Providence--that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever held--Homer and William Shakespeare--we know absolutely nothing!"--so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name "William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because we know so _little_, but because we know _so much_ about the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accurately what manner of man he was. We know almost every thing about him, in short, except--what we _do_ know about Homer--that the words now attributed to him were _his_. Homer, at least, we can trace to his "Iliad" and his "Odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. But neither to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the works be placed in our hands for the first time anonymously; given the chronicles of the age of Elizabeth and James in which to search for an author of these works, would any thing we found in either lead us to pronounce William Shakespeare their author? And has any thing happened _since_ to induce us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakes{156}peare was not the man he was, lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright?"