with a purchased "Esquire" to his name. * "The fatal end," he says, "of these fire is beggary--the alchiemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the poetaster." A "play-actor," he elsewhere affirms, was a fit subject for the grand jury, as a "vagrant." ** "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852. p. 88. {293}No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known contemporary actor, but "who led the skeltering life peculiar to his trade! and who had either divined or shared the secret of the "Shakespearean" dramas, raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in borrowed plumes! Was William Shakespeare a shrewd masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap or morsel has been found. The explanation of all this mystery, according to the New Theory, is of very little value, except in so far as it throws light upon what otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these magnificent philosophical dramas (which are more precious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our enlightened day) should have been popular with the coarse audiences of the times from which they date. Rut, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent productions were simply sent out under a name that was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of exceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the "Hamlet" to what M. Taine calls "a debauch of imagination... which no fair and frail dame in London should be without" *--the "Venus and Adonis"--it was immaterial what they printed as his, so this William Shakespeare earned his fee for his silence. As for young Southampton--then just turned of nineteen--his part in the covert work of the {294}junta might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the accepting of the famous dedication. * Crawley, quoted by Taine, "English Literature," book ii., chapter iv. That a rustic butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door of a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his invention"--the very first thing he turned his pen to--so maturely voluptuous a poem as the "Venus and Adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other miracles, not to be lost sight of.