"Oh, he picked it up around Stratford, somehow!" "But his learning?" "Oh, he found it lying around the theater somewhere!" * "Bunyan," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay. ** Ibid. {167}Probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the chroniclers! And so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural question, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, the question is not, "Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, "Had he access to the material from which the plays are composed?" Admit him to have been the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where did he get--not the poetry, but--the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information--the facts that crowd these pages? And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that works to William Shakespeare's renown, and a corresponding retention of every tradition or anecdote to his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why reject the story of King James's autograph letter, and retain the story of the trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy's deer? the answer must be: first; because, while there is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of improbability in the former. King James was a king, and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission {168}to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen Victoria; but it would be vastly improbable that Queen Victoria should write an autograph letter to the haberdasher to that effect. Second, because the poaching story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the memory of man runneth not to a time when it was not believed; whereas the King James story first appeared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Bernard Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the word of "a credible person then living." But everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no "biographer" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, the letter from King James and the letter from Queen Elizabeth, produced by young Ireland, are equally genuine correspondence. But the stories