Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, who supplied his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas--who is computed to have written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his intrigues, but cut them all open "with a knife" in the last act--probably did write "without blotting a line." At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, "nature would have overstepped her bounds, and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any department of literature." * But in the case of these marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to believe that nature _had_ "produced the marvelous," rather than accept the simple truth that what Hem-inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the engrossed parts written out for each actor, and not the first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote. * Literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8. Except that Mr. Spedding, in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for February, 1852, printed a paper "Who wrote {184}Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"--in which he claimed to have found startling traces of two hands in that play, (and possibly some other floating papers which have escaped our search)--prior to the year 1852 it had occurred to nobody (except Kitty, in "High Life Below Stairs") to ask the question, "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous writer, in Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," distinctly and for the first time discussed the question, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"--when, after going overmuch of the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his own "extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the conclusion), that William Shakespeare "kept a poet." It is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily as Lady Bab herself, with the question: and (while unconscious of the elaborate network of evidence he might have summoned, and suggesting no probable author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakespeare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the immortal plays was a purchased interest--precisely what the law at present understands by "proprietary copyright."