'Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also composed the "Fair Em;" or the classicist who produced the "Julius Cæsar" and the "Coriolanus" at about the same time achieved "The Merry Devil" and "The London Prodigal," is a question lying within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" which has "established" and forever "proved" so many wonderful things about "our Shakespeare"--a realm beyond our purview in these papers, and wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately, however, the question has been settled for us by those to whom criticism is not ultra vies, and may safely be said to be at rest now and forever. The burden of the judgment of the whole critical world is of record that the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" consists of the plays first brought together in one book by Heminges and Condell, plus the "Pericles;" and that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to have been published under the name of William Shakespeare are "spurious;" that, during the lifetime of William Shakespeare, and in the city where he dwelt--under his very nose, that is to say--divers and sundry plays did appear from time to time which he did not write, but which he fathered. Whether, in pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bastardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the critical world find it unprofitable to speculate. But there can be no reasonable doubt that, in London in {292}the days of Elizabeth, in the name of "William Shakespeare" there was much the same sort of common trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of Victoria, in the name "Jean Maria Farina"--that it was at everybody's service. And if William Shakespeare farmed ont his name to playwrights, just as the only original Farina farms out his to makers of the delectable water of Cologne, wherein shall we find fault? If, two hundred years after, a lesser Sir Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity in denying his fatherhood of "Waverly," for the sake of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, for the sale of the great book, will stretch out far enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare, who neither affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace! William Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke lays that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vagabond and a tramp, * never had to shift for his living. He always had money to spend, and money to lend, in the days when we know many of his contemporaries in the theatrical and dramatic line were "in continued and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner. ** Of all the co-managers--and, among them, one Burbage was the Booth or Forrest of his day--William Shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman