Nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the commentators. By the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker--but, after all, a Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. But that, little by little--each commentator, either in rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to be one item ahead of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, or too subservient to authority to rebel--it grew to vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge "biographies" of the last half century to be assured. It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy contributed to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" its article "Shakespeare." That about the story of the prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky-raftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopædia" would probably have doubted. But that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should have printed {157}so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy supplied to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must certainly command surprise. There can surely be complaint as to the variety of the performance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely speculates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and whether that gentleman received the patronage of Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and instruct the reader). And his speculations as to whether the messengers who sped to Worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies of the names "Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially pretty reading. But--with facilities in 1839 for writing a history of the Stratford lad, which the Stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hundred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never to have possessed--Mr.