Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear-eans struggle: that in those years the man William Shakespeare _did_ live, and was a theatrical manager and actor in London; and precisely the same evidence which convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world to-day--or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it--that the dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because they were first published from the stage of William Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call certain readings of the classics the "Delphin classics," because brought together for a Dauphin of Prance; or certain paintings "Düsseldorf paintings," because produced in the Düsseldorf school. If, however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named Düsseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. If there had been no Dauphin and no Düsseldorf, we might have assigned those names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures. If there had been no William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized one who could have written the plays. But, unhap{057}pily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the Shakespeareans want. And, moreover, once the presumption is waived and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault.