The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller's 'Worthies,' folio, 1662; in 'Warwickshire,' page 116--where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699--add anything to the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not {078}have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion." The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the Worshipful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept--would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut--namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were {079}certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty--without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and--except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone--passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song--though he might have begged his bread in their streets--at least did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas