counterfeit handwriting of Nature? The great ex-chancellor had stooped to watch even the "red-hipped bumble-bee" and the "small gray-coated gnat." Had the busy manager been studying them as well? His last act on earth was to alight from his carriage to gather handfuls of snow, to ascertain if snow could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead flesh; and it is related that, in his dying moments--for the very act precipitated the fever of which he died--he did not forget, to record that the experiment had succeeded "excellently well." From these to lordly music, * and in all the range between, no science had escaped Francis Bacon. Had the busy {298}manager followed or preceded the philosopher's footsteps, step by step, up through them all? * Ulrici, p. 248, book ii, Chapter vi., refers to "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Act 1, Sc. 2. as proving that the author of that play "possessed in an unusual degree the power of judging and understanding the theory of music." And did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, pen in hand, to take a trip to Italy, or a run-up into Scotland to get the name of a hostelry or the topography of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as well as a play as he went along? If the manager alone was the author of these works, there is, we have seen, no refuge from this conviction. But, if, as is the New Theory, those plays were amplified for the press by a learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage manager, actor, and human being that history asserts him to have been. If, as has been conjectured, William Shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with which these stately dramas are relieved, it would account for the supposed Warwickshire source of many of them. And if William Shakespeare was pretty familiar with the constabulary along his route between home and theater, so often traveled by himself and jolly coetaneans with heads full of Marian Hackett's ale, and thought some of them good enough to put into a play, his judgment has received the approval of many audiences beside those of the Bankside and Blackfriars. The Shakespearean plays, as now performed in our theaters, are the editions of Cibber, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Macready, Booth, Irving, and others, and, while preserving still the dialogues which passed, perhaps, through Shakespeare's hands, retain no traces of his industry, once so valuable to the Globe and Blackfriars, but now rejected as unsuited to the exigencies of the modern stage, the "business" inserted in them by William Shakespeare's editorship has long since been rejected. Little as there is of the man of {299}Stratford in our libraries, there is still less of him in our theaters in 1881. But the world still retains the honest Dogberry, who lived at Grendon, in Bucks, on the road from London to Stratfordtown, and doubtless many more of the witty manager's master strokes. At least, the "New Theory" and the "Delia Bacon