And, moreover, it is a satisfactory explanation of what can not be explained in any other way (and which no Shakespearean has ever yet attempted to explain at all), of the fact that William Shakespeare, making his last Will and Testament at Stratford, in 1515, utterly ignored the existence of any literary property among his assets, or of his having used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the competency of which he died possessed. Had William Shakespeare been the courtly favorite of two sovereigns (which Mr. Hallam doubts * ), it is curious that he never was selected to write a Masque. Masques were the standard holiday diversions of the nobles of the day, to which royalty was so devoted that it is said the famous Inigo Jones was maintained for some years in the employment of devising the trappings for them alone (though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, as to the matter we have in hand). But if William Shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous tradesman that we have record of (and, that he came to London poor and left it rich, everybody knows), was he not shrewd enough, as well, to see that his audiences did not require philosophical essays and historical treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to verify the customs of the early Cyprians, or pause to explore for them the secrets of nature? We may assert him to be a "great moral teacher" to-day; but, had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would have set his stage to empty houses. He could have earned the same money with much less trouble to {272}himself. * "Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 77 (note).