That the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet--as ever having been seen with a hook in his hand--driven by poverty to shift for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhuman literary talents. Southampton never was suspected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility and that of a peasant lad--who (even if we disbelieve his earliest biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London {041}career. But yet, according to the various "chronologies" (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally with the dates--when known--of their production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy hardly puts in his appearance in London before he presents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with--if not the most mature--at least the most carefully polished production that William Shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to this very day.