Bobert Burns had sung of the Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubtless--with history staring him in the face--have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty {164}over which a Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight can not easily clamber. If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, Land of all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote--to find him, "Fancy's child," warbling "his native Wood-notes wild," indeed! But of Troy, Tyre, and Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child" could sing in the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when "a tinker was rogue by statute." * And yet he, according to Macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which England should be proudest. ** What was the miracle in the case of John Bunyan? He produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... This is the highest miracle of art, that things which{165}are not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought." * Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214. ** "Though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise Lost,' and the other the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"