* He had not failed to see Dogberry and Shallow in the little villages of Warwickshire--and the wonderful "Watch." The "Watch" of those days was indeed something to wonder at. In a letter of Lord Burleigh to Sir Francis Walsingham, written in 1586, the writer says that he once saw certain of them standing "so openly in pumps" in a public place, that "no suspected person would come nigh them;" and, on his asking them what they stood there for, they answered that they were put there to apprehend three men, the only description they had of them was that one of them had a hooked nose. "If they be no better instructed but to find three persons by one of them having a hooked nose, they may miss thereof," reflects Burghley, with much reason. Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his "Outline of the Life of William Shakespeare" (Brighton, 1881), page 66, thinks that this is unlikely, because the magistrate mentioned by Aubrey would have been too old in 1642, if he had been the model sought. It must be conceded, say the new theorists: I. That the plays, whether in the shape we now have them or not, are, at least, under the same {306}names and with substantially the same dramatis personæ. II. That William Shakespeare was the stage manager, or stage editor; or, at any rate, touched up the plays for representation. III. That the acting copies of the plays, put into the hands of the players to learn their parts from, were more or less in the handwriting of William Shakespeare, and that from these acting copies the first folio of 1623 was set up and printed. At least, the best evidence at hand seems to establish all three of these propositions. This evidence is meager and accidental, but, for that very reason, involuntary, and, therefore, not manufactured; and it establishes the above propositions, as far as it goes, as follows: I. In a volume, "Poste, with a racket of Madde-Letters," printed in 1603, a young woman is made to say to her lover: "It is not your liustie rustie can make me afraide of your big lookes, for I saw the plaie of Ancient Pistoll, where a craking coward was well cudgelled for his knavery; your railing is so near the rascall that I am almost ashamed to bestow so good a name as the rogue upon you." Again, Sharpham, in his "Fleire," printed in 1607, has this piece of dialogue: "_Kni_.--And how lives he with 'am? "_Fie_.--Faith, like This be in the play, a' has almost killed himselfe with the scabbard!"