The salaciousness Elizabeth wanted (if the story is true) was all there, as well as the transformation scene; but, at the end, there is a re{311}buke to lechery and to lecherous minds that is not equivocal in its terms. * But that any of this Shakespeare fortune came, by way of gift or otherwise, from Southampton, there is no ground, except silly and baseless rumor, for believing. If Southampton had been the Rothschild of his time--which he was very far from being--he would not have given a thousand pounds (a sum we have estimated as equaling $25,000 to-day, but which Mr. Grant White puts at $30,000, and which Mr. Halliwell Phillips, ** on account of the "often fictitious importance attached to cash, arising from its comparative scarcity in those days," says ought even be as high as twelve pounds for one) to a casual acquaintance. The mere passing of such a sum would seem to involve other relations; and if Southampton knew Shakespeare, or Shakespeare Southampton, let it be demonstrated from some autobiographical or historical source--from some other source than the "Biographies of William Shakespeare," written by those slippery rhapsodists, the Shakespereans. If Damon and Pythias were friends, let it appear from the biographies of Damon, as well as from the biographies of Pythias. Let us find it in some of Southampton's papers, or in the archives or papers of some of his family, descendants, contemporaries, or acquaintances; in the chronicles of Elizabeth, Raleigh, Cecil, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, Camden, Coke, Bacon, Tobie Mathew, Ben Jonson, or of somebody alive and with open eyes in London {312}at about that date, before we yield it historical assent, and make oath to it so solemnly. * Perhaps, if the story were true, a rebuke to Elizabeth personally in the line (Act V., Scene v.), "Our radiant Queen hates sluts and sluttery." As a matter of fact, and as the industrious Mr. Lodge confesses, * there is no such trace or record. Except from, the "biographers" of Shakespeare, no note, hint, or surmise, connecting the two names, can be anywhere unearthed, and they only draw the suggestion on which they build such lofty treatises from a dedication printed in the days when printers helped themselves to any name they wanted without fear of an injunction out of chancery. That any sonnets were ever dedicated to Southampton by anybody, is, we have seen, pure invention. III. But that the famous First Folio of 1623 was set up from piecemeal parts written for separate actors, and that these were in William Shakespeare's handwriting, there seems to be contemporary circumstantial evidence.