Mr. Phillips brings much learning to prove that William may have been "pre-contracted" to Anne Hathaway--that his death may have been from malarial fever {254}rather than inebriation--which have nothing at all to do with the question or the practical difficulties cited by the anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. But as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light and has no word to say. {255} PART VI. THE NEW THEORY--THE SONNETS--CONCLUSION. [Illustration: 9261] F a matter so indifferent as the number of pebbles in Demosthenes' mouth when he practiced oratory on the beach, no effort of credulity can be predicated. But when a proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It would be interesting, for example, to compile a catalogue of the reasons why A, B, and C, and their friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling to the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes it because somebody else (Bacon will do as well as anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the sort of man who would surrender any of the glory to which he was himself entitled, to another. B, because, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his style was quite another than the style of the dramas. C, because he is satisfied that William Shakespeare spent some terms at Stratford school, and was any thing but unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption is too old to be disturbed; as if we should always go on believing in William Tell and the man in the moon, because our ancestors believed in them! And so on, through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for instance, to believe that miracles should appear by the page, or that universal wisdom should spring fully {256}armed from the brain of a Warwickshire clown, than that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should write anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing one de novo. Now, say the New Theorists, if at about that time, a living nomme de plume should happened to be wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable than that of a young "Johannes Factotum," of the Blackfriars, who, by doing any thing and every thing that was wanted, and saving every honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever appears to have allowed himself out of his increasing prosperity) * and a county seat? Four or five years before our historical William Shakespeare had bethought himself of wandering to London, one James Burbage, father of Richard, the actor, had built the Blackfriars Theater, a plain, rough building on the site of the present publishing office of the "Times."