"The plays apparently arise... as the series goes on; all at once Shakespeare, with a fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any other supposition than the death of the poet and the survival of the employer?" Of this supposititious hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakespeare the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture {186}that has something familiar in its coloring. "May not William Shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret over-looking the 'silent highway of the Thames,' some pale, wasted student... who, with eyes of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some cheap and speedy means of death? What was to hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood? With this view the disputed passages--those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting--the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in--the occasional bad taste--in short, all the imperfections discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of Shakespeare himself on his poet's works. * Miss Delia Bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in a paper printed in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 1856, (and therefore must have written it in 1855), and was supposed therein to distinctly announce and maintain that Lord Bacon--her namesake by coincidence--was the "Shakespeare" wanted--a supposition which, as we shall see, was erroneous. * Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal,"'August 7, 1852, p. 88.